Coin Operated Boy
by DollyPop12
Summary: Marie, leading a double life as an Engineer for Baba Yaga Enterprises and a Vulture for a resistance group, finds an abandoned cyborg, codenamed Franken Stein, who has had his emotional receptors traumatically compromised. But as she begins to fall, both for him and down the rabbit hole of his past, she finds that locating who had abused him is biting off more than she can chew.
1. Sitting on the Shelf

_"And all the people say: 'You can't wake up, this is not a dream: you're part of a machine, you are not a human being.'_

 _. . ._

 _I think there's a flaw in my code, these voices won't leave me alone._

 _Well my heart is gold and my hands are cold."_

~Halsey, Gasoline

* * *

Marie coughed into her homemade mask, composed of nothing more than the collar of her hoodie secured over her lips. Her one good eye was watering from the noxious air of the dump-site, and her nose was still somewhat exposed. She was careful to breathe through her mouth alone, knowing that a single whiff of the radioactive trash-site would singe her sinuses to hell and back. She huffed after her lungs and throat calmed, making sure she was silent as she could be, cursing the fact that she had to trespass in a glorified landfill. She wouldn't have to if her bank account wasn't all too drained for her to pick up quality parts at an actual shop. Then again, if the parts weren't disgustingly overpriced, she wouldn't have to lament her bank account either.

When she heard a rustle, she sped up her stride, ducking around a massive trash-heap, her golden orb sharply picking out anything potentially usable as well as any threats. Occasionally, she swept her hand up to clean some stray dust off of her cheek, trying to remain alert. Marie grumbled under her breath about Baba Yaga Enterprise's monopoly on anything technological, making it impossible to buy anything without sacrificing your arm for it, but she continued to skid through the polluted junkyard smoothly.

It was, without doubt, a Thursday, judging from how much of a graveyard the place was. The guards, all two of them, seemed hammered out of their minds. Certainly inebriated enough not to notice a petite blonde in all black tip-toeing through the refuse, which was all the better for her. If she was caught, she didn't even want to think of the repercussions she'd face. The rest of the group, too, would take the fall if anyone even began to suspect that they were repurposing parts that were meant for recycling.

Marie was nervous about it, as she always was, her stomach knotting into a noose at the very thought of having to face Arachne Gorgon's countless attorneys. Just three years ago, Kami was dragged away from little Maka, all for having the audacity to do what Marie was doing now: hunting. Being good at her job.

Marie spotted a chunk of gleaming chrome, bright amongst the rust, and her heart flopped, eye widening. It would be a good day, then. She hoped. Anything too big was useless: it would be too old of a model to do anything with if that were case. She took a sharp breath in, holding it while she bent down to where the part was, all the way at the bottom of the heap, her hands shaking as she tried to locate the number on it.

'798-Nagatsu,' she read, her eye drooping in disappointment.

No good. Now-a-days, Nagatsukasa parts were all old and incompatible, after one of the androids, Matsamune, absolutely malfunctioned and killed who bought him. Almost turned on his sister model as well. If it was a 900 level part, she could at least bring it to Azusa to try to format it for Tsubaki, but anything under 800 was sure to reject. Whatever they got out of it would probably be rust and dust and brittle disappointment. It frustrated her that Tsubaki was desperately in need of some maintenance, but there was no one selling the proper parts for her.

After they helped her escape, she became one of the most valuable cyborgs on the market if found, last Marie heard. The girl could take care of herself, but she shouldn't have to. Marie clicked her tongue, disgusted at the thought.

She felt her jaw grind as her teeth grit together, but remembered what Azusa told her about getting too emotional about the 'Cyborg Situation'. Marie brought her hand to her cheek again, wiping with the inner sleeve of her jacket and straightened, turning around to try to find something else. Everything in the site was mostly rusted to copper, utterly unusable. Besides which, it ended this way more often than not. She'd have to tell Azusa that there was nothing this time. Maybe it was picked clean by someone earlier. Marie'd have to bring up a change of scheduling, again.

If only they'd listened to her and let her go earlier, two weeks ago. Justin was never wrong about his tip-offs: they would have been able to find that box of auto-chips. Stripping them of their serial numbers and models would have been easy for Spirit: the man had a gift for ruining and repurposing. It should have been theirs. But no. Azusa just had to insist that going on a Monday was all too dangerous.

Of course it was. That's when everything new got dumped. It would probably be crawling with Vultures. Marie tugged her collar up higher on her face, breaking into a jog in order to get to her break-in slot. She barely had thirty minutes in the section she was in before Azusa's desensitizing device would flicker out and die. Sometimes, she wished they lived back in the old days, when you could just cut a line in a fence and slide on through. None of this holographic wall bullshit that burned you to a crisp if you didn't have a genius around who could make a system-freezing device with some bubble-gum wrappers and a singular screw-driver.

But that wasn't Marie's business. Marie's business was finding her way to trash-pile number six and running through the small slit in the Holo-wall before she got murdered. She squinted her eye as she sped up to a sprint, unknowing of what time it was. Any Gorgon patented technological devices within six feet of that damn wall would trigger an alarm: something Azusa hadn't been able to work her way around. And it just wasn't worth it to construct a watch since Marie had an eerily good radar for when she had to get in and out of a situation.

And she should, besides. Marie'd been trespassing since she got that damn job under Arachne, working in Giriko's division to synthetically create emotions in emotionless cyborgs. She hated working there. No one seemed to care in the slightest for the automatons they brought in, blank faced and disposable.

Marie's fist clenched while she made her way past trash-heap 9, characterized by the massive, rusted gear sticking out of it, caked in spiderweb's silk. She was close, then. She made sure to squint her eye even more. She learned her lesson after the first time she went full-sprint through the murky atmosphere and got paint-chips in her eye.

That wasn't the best doctor's appointment of her life. Mira'd been all too concerned for Marie to relax. And for good reason: she lost it, her eye, in the end.

Finally, after what felt like all too long, she spotted the flickering, luminescent wall with just the barest tear in it, off to her left. She swiveled her head, bringing her hood down closer to her face and her collar up closer to her mouth. She bit down on the fabric, knowing the fumes were most noxious the closer you got to the threshold.

Two months with bronchitis taught her that particular tidbit.

Quickly, ducking her head and curling her spine in, she sidled close to the pile so she could observe where the guards were. Talking. Loudly. She could almost smell the booze through the thick, disgusting air. Though, it was clearly a lie. Smelling anything in that place was near impossible.

The instant they turned around, swaying and staggering, she broke into a gallop and dove through the tear, making sure that she twisted her body so her rather flared out hips wouldn't catch on what was left intact. She barely made a single sound: certainly not enough to alert anyone.

With shaking hands, still holding her breath, she grasped hold of the device Azusa made and stuffed it into her pocket. She knew she barely had thirty seconds to get out while the camera pointed at her was still flickering, frozen on a previous image. After that, she'd be on her own.

She smelled disgusting. She knew she did. The streets would definitely be fuller after the theft a few weeks ago, but that was fine: Blair's Pumpkin Pub wasn't too far away and the woman was always happy to let her in to change in the bathrooms. That, and all her staff was more than happy to spray her down with some overpowering perfume that smelled of vanilla soap doused in Vodka, easily masking the smell of decaying chemicals on her skin and clothes.

It was nice to have a place she could dispose of her toxic threads at, especially since it was located so closely to the site. Blair let her have a key after one too many scares fumbling with the fingerprint identification. Risa and Arisa made fun of her for days, that she had to carry around a key as though she were from the Stone Age, but Blair was too nervous that another close call where there were sirens blaring and Marie was wasting precious seconds trying to get to safety could mean the end. For all of them. The concern was more than welcome: the fact that Blair was like family to Maka certainly helped things along.

Marie had to make double-time to the bar, everyone was more cautious after that theft. She was lucky security was still so sparse. She heard at work that they were trying to beef it up, but the police were fighting that too much caution would wear everyone down.

Marie swallowed hard as she made her way to the thresholds: nothing but useless barb wire put up for show, though it wasn't going to intimidate any Vulture that had more than five months of experience. Or anyone who knew anyone with more than that. And Marie was a veteran at what she did.

So she clenched her fists, trying to calm her shaking and jogged off, eye still watering, making good time.

Empty handed, again.

* * *

Spirit was smoking by the time she got to Azusa's house. Justin wasn't around, too busy sleeping off three nights worth of insomnia at his own home, something that seemed to be happening more and more often since the crackdown. Spirit dropped the smoke down onto the floor, immediately stomping over it with his boot and turned without saying a word to her, slinking into the house.

Marie sighed, following after him. She closed the door with a soft click, but Azusa was already rushing into the living room, her perfect eyes skimming over her friend, trying to see how the run went without asking. She must have realized, because her shoulders slumped, just barely, and she just flopped onto her couch.

"Nothing?" Spirit asked, sitting down on the armrest and absentmindedly playing with the sleeve of his police-jacket. Marie fished out the device Azusa gave her, useless for anything other than scrap metal, and set it onto the table, sitting on the loveseat across from them.

"There was a Nagatsu-part."

Spirit looked at the ceiling. "Those always seem to be floating around."

"Yeah. . ." Marie responded, running her thumb over her well-scrubbed lips. A bath in a sink was never ideal, but she supposed she'd just have to get over it. "Any news from the station?"

"They want to have a meeting for a few hours tomorrow."

"About the parts?"

Spirit nodded. "Whoever got them fucked everyone else. Should've just taken a few, so no one missed them. Idiots."

"The question is why anyone would throw them away in the first place," Marie threw back

"Well, no ideas from the station. Any conspiracy theories involving Baba Yaga?"

"Nothing. Giriko was baffled," Marie informed, setting her elbows on her thighs and leaning forward. "No news from Sid or Mira about who it could have been?"

"I'm more concerned about what they'd do with the damn things," Spirit commented. "There's gotta be something wrong with them if they're thrown away. They're too new a model to be recycled for scrap."

Azusa looked over at Spirit, elbowing him in the side, huffing. "It was probably an accident. Some incompetence that let perfectly good chips go to the trash. Why else would anyone notice?"

Marie's lower lip dropped down a bit, the realization washing over her. "Right. . .right! No one ever does inventory on the dump-sites."

Spirit's brows met. "But no one reported anything."

"B.Y.E doesn't have to report anything," Marie spat. "They're exempt from the law so long as they throw enough money at it. I wouldn't be surprised if a report conveniently showed up later."

Spirit chewed his lip, closing his eyes. "Yeah. Yeah," he agreed, sounding weary. He'd been pulling all too many overtime shifts recently. It was lucky they got him over today: it was just a shame it proved fruitless.

"Is there any good news?" Marie asked, determined to turn the conversation.

The silence in the room spoke louder than anything else ever could have.

* * *

 **Evidence File #11 for Case 3419**

 ** _October 7th_**

 _I hate doing nothing. Baba Yaga doesn't take up enough time to keep me from thinking. If only everyone had listened to me and let me go on that run a few days earlier._

 _The schedule needs to change. We haven't been keeping up with demand enough._

 _Honestly, I don't care how tired I am. If an extra run can help even one more person, I'm ready to do that for them._

 _Tsubaki sent me a postcard a few days ago. She's finding the modifications effective. No one has even looked at her funny since she finally managed to human pass._

 _It's people like her that remind me why I do what I do._

 _I wish I could give her more than good luck. I wish I could do more._

* * *

Azusa wasn't comfortable with sending Marie on another run for a good two weeks, especially with the reports Spirit gave them about how security was being upped. It was a bitter pill because they all knew Baba Yaga wasn't trying to protect their trash. They were just trying to make it worse on the resistance groups. The actual parts themselves weren't the issue.

The resistance groups that sold the repurposed parts on a black market were barely on their radar: it was the people who used those parts for repairing undocumented cyborgs that really concerned Baba Yaga.

They were the ones who couldn't be bought with money. They were the ones who burned for change. And that bubbled in Marie's bones.

She never wanted to be an engineer for Baba Yaga. As a girl, when cyborgs were first being churned out, she had stars in her eyes from how incredible they looked. Back then, she couldn't have known the ugly truth about the human experimentation. About how the founder of, what had then been called Gorgon Enterprises, would lure people in with the promise of monetary compensation, only to sedate them, to change their skeletal structure, to hardwire them.

No, back then, Marie had nothing in her head of resistance groups or protests. She only thought the way chrome met skin was beautiful, the glint of the glass eyes, the slightly mechanical smile.

She'd wanted to be a nurse, at first.

When she found out that a nurse for cyborgs was uncalled for, that it was foolish, stupid, naïve ("Oh, Marie. They don't deserve help"), she took the only other route possible, as an engineer.

It was too sour to realize that her plans had failed her, that there she was, a girl who once had two sparkling eyes that saw a future of tending to, forced to watch torture in action.

It was sick.

And it felt wrong to sit about and twiddle her thumbs, to make the commute to Baba Yaga Labs and take notes about Giriko's "experiments". Marie was sick to death of seeing innocent people strapped to operating tables, and whether water or rust or electric shock, she felt each pinprick of pain echo in her as she watched them. There were pain receptors, but no sorrow. There was agony but no fear. And she'd stare as their mouths would barely open in a scream they didn't have the means to make, their coding practically weeping on the screen, begging for mercy until—

Marie always had to swallow down her tears, both mournful and furious, so that when Arachne walked in, her lacy black fan lazily held in front of her face, Marie could report to the black-haired woman with a voice that was steady.

That was why, though she was rummaging through glorified trash, she finally felt clean again. Nothing could really scrub away the horror of working in Baba Yaga, the frustration, the absolute yearning to throw Giriko to the side and cradle the prone body strapped to the table, to do something other than bullshit undercover work that was mostly patience and compliance than true rebellion.

Out in the rubbish heaps, she knew she was making a difference. Even if she came back empty handed, she could rest with the knowledge that she tried.

This time, she had to peek around every corner, her body entirely cloaked in black, new, disposable clothes. It wasn't the same hoodie-collar over her mouth, but it was practically identical, and her blonde hair had already come loose from the elastic, settling over her shoulders, making for a sharp contrast. It was the only part of her out of place among the rusted metal. It was stupid of her to have her hair uncovered, and she considered pulling her hood up and risking the chance of blunting her hearing.

However, when she stepped forward and heard the crunch with barely a second to spare, she thanked her instincts for not hindering her hearing, and she hopped backward with an agility that no one would ever expect from her. The air in her lungs felt stale as she held her breath, crouching down and sliding close to the massive heap of garbage to her side as she listened in to the footsteps of the guards patrolling the area. She slapped her palm over her mouth, stifling any sound she was going to make by breathing, and made sure to hold each muscle taut while the three walked past.

From her spot close to the floor, she could only make out their boots, high, tall things that came to over their knees, with their coarse pants tucked in. She'd seen the outfit too many times when Spirit was still working those shifts, before he got promoted at the station.

She didn't have the time for them to mosey along so lazily, and she resisted huffing and rolling her eye as her heartbeat thudded in her ears.

"It's bullshit," one of the female guards said, barely muffled through her gas-mask, practically crawling by. "It's empty as shit out here."

"Aw, calm yer tits, Sal. Only means we won't gotta do nothin' major tonight."

"I could be home, jackass. Who the fuck wants to muddle through all this crap?" she replied, the toe of her boot purposefully hitting against a random, protruding piece of junk and sending it skittering into one of the several heaps. Instead of softly settling, however, it smacked, hard, against the base, sending multiple things tumbling to the ground and kicking up dust and debris. Marie flinched at the noise, pressing herself as close to the shadows as she could. The pile collapsed close to her, nearly smothering her entire body in the heavy materials, and she thanked the fact that she was so small, else she'd be killed.

What a way to go, she thinks bitterly, her hands shaking and body feeling electric with nerves and panic.

Regardless, she was glad enough of the fact that, though security was indeed elevated, the interest levels of the people on duty for combing the area adequately were as low as always. They barely glanced over at where everything had collapsed, and as she huddled further, curling in on herself and half hiding behind the pile, they skipped the lump of her furled body entirely.

And why would they pay any extra attention, underpaid and overworked as they were? Budget cuts, Marie heard. Only the very starters were ever forced to patrol the trash sites and it gave the higher ups an excuse to pay them pennies. Not only were they novice, but they had a job no one wanted, especially during the graveyard shift, which was usually the most staffed since no Vulture worth their salt would ever show up in daylight. It would practically be a neon sign, no matter how stealthy they were. No, better to stay in the shadows, working in some horrific place during the day and fighting at night when the guards were tired, hungry, and absolutely uninterested.

The conditions were bad for them but good for her. If they actually paid them properly, she'd likely be dead multiple times over, but she was still alive.

For the time being. Because everyone knew that what she was doing was dangerous. It was one of the easiest ways to get caught. To get killed.

Marie's eye trained on the massive rifles strapped to the guards' backs, and the woman who'd played soccer with the random piece of equipment let out a groan. The larger man next to her, the one with the accent, only chuckled.

"Now lookit what you done did, Sal."

"Who gives a fuck?" she responded, scathingly. "The entire place is a dump site. Ain't no organization to be found. Just leave that shit where it is."

Slowly, ever so slowly, they continued walking, the third party sparing a glance at the fallen pile before simply sighing and following their partners, the three of them rounding the new corner the trash heap made before Marie took in a sharp gasp through the fabric of her jacket.

The waiting was the most excruciating part. It was what made her count off in her head, wondering how much time she'd lost. In her pockets, she'd managed to find a few small things, tiny fans to keep parts from overheating, some still functional scrap metal Azusa had requested, gears aplenty. The packs that she kept slung around her hips were stuffed with enough outdated parts to keep Spirit busy for a good two weeks, fiddling around and stripping them of any sign of prior ownership.

When her heart calmed, finally settling down, she got up as silently as she could, proud when she tip-toed her way, silently, around the mess that had developed around her.

The quiet was only punctuated by the faded voices of the multiple guards making rounds and Marie determined that, if she wasn't seen crouched down and huddled, she'd risk her hair being free rather than risking her hearing. The choice could save her life.

Had saved her life.

With just one eye, her ears were proving one of her most valuable assets, and she made quick work in surveying the area she'd been hiding near.

She didn't have much time left until the system freezing device deactivated. Azusa still hadn't figured out a way to make it last longer, but Marie was used to the draconian time-frame she had to work in, and she figured, with so many parts weighing her down, it was as good as she was going to get.

Still, there would be no harm in looking over what had been revealed by the woman making the heap collapse. It wasn't every day Marie got a chance like that, and she made her way forward, keen eye observing what was revealed.

The vast majority, if not everything, was absolute junk, genuinely fit for being in a scrap-yard, and though she knew she'd done her job, done it well, she couldn't help but be disappointed by the fact that there wasn't some treasure that had been lying beneath the layers of newer garbage.

That was why, when she stood and made quick work to the fence, knowing she'd have to make her way out in less than 10 minutes, she completely looked him over.

And with his silver hair, dirtied and dusty, a chunk of his face nothing but the exposed, mechanical skeleton that had the organic skin ripped off, revealing an angry looking infection and torn muscle, it was no wonder she didn't notice him. Instead, her boot stepped forward, one after the other, as she hurried.

It was the whisper that made her stop. The slight rasp, the hitch in a throat.

Her heart froze entirely, her entire body jolting before her eye went wide and she whirled around, looking to see where it could have come from. It was quiet, but it was close. It was so close, so near to her, it could have bubbled from her very bones.

It sounded nothing like the far off cursing she heard from the guards. Instead, it was the darkest, most quiet "Please" she'd ever heard in her life.

When she looked down, finally, she realized that it was a good thing that she still had her hand over her collar, holding it over her mouth, because seeing him, seeing anyone, curled up under a pile of scrap so heavy, were he entirely organic, he'd be crushed to death, made her heart ache so deeply.

Immediately, she is crouching, trying her hardest to be silent though she finds that she is muttering "Oh my God," on a loop, horrified.

There was no hesitation when her hands came to his shoulders, and when she looked at his face, something in her chest stuttered, taking note of bad he looked. And yet, he only repeated "P-pl-please", as though on a loop, sounding soft and distressed. His olive eyes were unfocused, coagulated blood flecked over what of his face wasn't exposed, mechanical skeleton, and she felt her eye prick with tears before she steeled herself, trying to think of a strategy.

"I'm here," she assured him, though he seemed to make no notice of her voice. "I'm here, hold on, okay? Okay?" she asked, starting to pull what was on top of him off, setting it to the side as tentatively as she could.

Something started to well up in her, fury, yes, but an even sharper panic than before.

She barely had any time to get herself out of that deathtrap of a dump-site, and when she looked at him, trying to determine how much he would weigh, how much of a burden he'd be, because there was no chance he could just walk out of there by himself, she realized that getting him out could end up with both of them murdered.

But when she looked at him, something seemed to come into focus on his face, and he jolted for a moment, hissing in pain and sounding more like an escaping of steam than anything else, but she was reminded, immediately, of her girlhood. Of wanting to help. Of needing to help.

She had five minutes. She couldn't gently set things to the side or she'd run out of time before she'd get even semi-close enough to dig him out. The options were laid in front of her.

She could leave. That was always available to her. She could take her small treasures with her, her small finds from the garbage site to Azusa and pretend nothing had happened. Perhaps the next time she'd show up to the dump site, he'd be there, still stuttering "P-pl-please".

Maybe he'd be stripped of parts, his system shutting down, his body refusing to work under the massive pressure it was under to remain functional. Maybe he'd be alive when some other Vulture got to him, one that saw a landmine of parts and not a person. Maybe he wouldn't be there anymore, one of the guards finding him, not knowing what to do.

None of those options ended with him safe.

Yes, she could leave. But she wouldn't. She wouldn't.

Which meant she had to act, and fast. She swallowed, hard before she dug her boots into the ground, grabbing hold of his limp arms.

"I'm sorry," she told him, knowing it would hurt to be yanked from the pile, but his moment of clarity had passed, and he was back to that same loop. In the moment before she pulled, she sent a prayer up to whatever deity liked her. If any. If any were listening or existing, in that moment, she figured she'd need them to help.

Because when she sharply tugged at him, with all of her might, the entire heap wobbled before it fell. In the moment before they were smashed beneath the avalanche, she threw them both to the side, landing hard on her belly before she scrambled to curl over the man, protecting his already wounded form with her far smaller one. But the danger wasn't in being crushed.

Partially, it was. But the real danger came from the high yelp of "What the fuck?" and "Is there anyone in sector 4?"

The danger came in the massive clatter, a symphonic cacophony that alerted everyone in the area.

The alarms were blaring so fast, she got whiplash turning around. Everything around her was ringing, alive and pulsing, her heart hammering so hard she thought her ribcage was going to splinter and collect at the bottom of her body in a pile of dust and bone-shards.

She had to **run**.

Her body screamed at her when she reared up with such ferocious intensity, she worried if she'd pulled or torn a muscle, but she didn't have the time to worry about such things, and she certainly didn't have the time to tip-toe her way out of the trash heap. She had been taught that it was the path of least resistance, most of the time, which was safest, most successful, even if that path was a winding catacomb back to freedom.

Not this time. This time it was running for her life. This time, it was running for his as well. She grasped his arm, slinging it over her shoulders before she realized that he was massive, bigger than she had expected. His shoulders alone took up the space of two of her, and his height was so huge, he nearly fell over her shoulder, almost bent in two.

She cursed her miniscule form, furiously, as she curled him close to her body, wishing he had some more focus, but he didn't. He was barely alive, and against her bruised, battered form, she felt his harsh breathing, the whir of his half-broken mechanics trying to keep him functioning.

Anything would have been more ideal. A piggyback, a fireman's carry, even bridal style, but she'd slung his arm around her shoulders and that was where he'd have to stay. She didn't have the time to adjust him. She didn't even have the time to think, only picking up a useless piece of scrap to throw as distraction when she made it closer to the fence. And then she was off, kicking a path so that she could book it, dragging him against her as she downright sprinted to the hole in the fence Azusa's machine was keeping open for her.

She gasped harshly and her throat burned as she raced, hearing gunshots being fired around her, metal on metal colliding around her and the siren downright wailing in her ears. She thinks she'd be deaf, but she can still make out that same pleading from him, the panic in his voice, his fear so thick that she could feel it resonate in her, her own horror mixing with his. With the loud roar going on, she figured the scrap wouldn't do much of anything at all, and she dropped it to wrap her arm around his waist, ducking her head down as she ran and her collar slipped from her mouth.

If she got bronchitis again, she thinks she might actually welcome it. It was better than finding herself in a grave, and she had a responsibility to Azusa, to Spirit, to all of her friends that were counting on her to make it out. Maka, Crona, all the kids she helped tutor on the weekends, she made a commitment to them, to live, to help the world so that it was better for them.

So that none of them would ever have to do what she was doing, putting their entire life on a string, fraying and bloodstained. They were depending on her. As was the man against her, so warm and alive. Alive. She refused to leave him behind though he was practically all deadweight.

The timer in her head told her that she didn't have even two minutes to spare when the woman-guard from earlier snarled to a stop in front of her and Marie had to scramble, her boots skidding against some metal when she changed her course and ducked down, shouldering the cyborg closer to her and trying to keep her face as well hidden as she possibly could, tucking it close to him as she evaded.

"You bitch!" the woman called out, her rifle supported over her arm as she loaded and aimed, and Marie didn't even yelp when she ducked behind a heap, shuddering and coughing, having inhaled some of the fumes so deeply into her lungs, she was worried that she'd singed something. She didn't take the single moment to adjust her makeshift gas-mask, instead, pushing the cyborg closer to her side as she kicked off from the ground, listening to the other woman's screech as she ran behind her.

Thank whoever was watching over her that she had such poor aim when she was on the move. She had likely been a sniper before she joined the Police Force, and she was too young to stop and aim, making it so that her shot would land home.

The inexperience was the best thing that could have possibly happened, especially when she collided against her partner who ran in too late, sending the two of them sprawling into a dangerously coloured puddle that had the woman screeching, rolling away and right into another pile of garbage, sending the entire thing falling. Marie didn't have the time to worry, her mind focused on getting out, getting alive, and through the sharp keen of "Sal!", she finally made it to the fence, though she could hear the thud of footsteps and the splash of radioactive waste and the scrape of the trash being thrown about.

She was out of time.

Mustering all the strength in her body, she hauled the cyborg up, and lord, he must have been close to three hundred pounds, weighed down with all his machinery. She grinded her teeth as her stomach clenched, her knees buckling under the weight.

She wasn't the Pulverizer for nothing, damnit. Then was not the time for her body to give out on her, refusing to cooperate. Hadn't she dragged him all the way there? Hadn't she pulled him from the rubbish? She was almost out of the fire. She just had to get him through the hole in the holo-fence and then she could make her way to Blair's Pumpkin Pub, begging for sanctuary.

She could do it and she knew she could, so she groaned, breathing short and sharp as she finally managed to throw him through the hole.

The flickering wasn't lost on her, nor was the fact that he made a clatter as he came through on the other side of the junkyard where she'd have to scrabble up the moat-like hole they'd situated the entire place in.

Azusa's device couldn't hold out. Not anymore. It was at the maximum time limit, and in the moment that it took for Marie to take a few steps back, getting a running start to leap through the opening, it had already started to close as the device died on her.

It caught her leg. Her left calf, and the electric fence jolted her body, making it feel like she was going to lose her entire lower half. When she fell to the other side, she tumbled, rolling and barely avoiding the already wounded cyborg.

But she couldn't afford rest. No doubt, the entire Police Department was going to show up. Soon. They were likely already on their way, probably alerting Spirit and he'd be dead worried. When she tried to stand up, her legs screamed at her and she collapsed instantly, her pant legs charred. When she looked down at what had once been sun-kissed flesh, she found a furious looking burn, the skin scraped off.

She had to shove that to the side and she nearly bit her tongue in half when she stood, again. The world wobbled in front of her, and she heard gunshots behind her, fence doors being opened, people screaming. She shook her head and stooped, scooping the cyborg up once more. His whispers had hushed more and more, though she wasn't sure if that was her deadened hearing, or him, but she could still feel his rasping breaths against her and so she had to have hope.

It couldn't have been for nothing. She wasn't dragging him from that garbage site cum potential graveyard just to have him die on her. She was going to keep him alive if it was the last thing she was going to do on that Earth.

And it very well could be, because with his hulking form draped over her along with her heavily wounded leg, she could barely move, and she could only hobble her way a few feet before she felt like collapsing in the dirt once more.

Adrenaline was a curious thing. She'd worked with it in the lab many times, seeing what properties organic adrenaline had in comparison to the synthetic versions. Though the synthetic adrenaline was adequate enough, it couldn't replicate the pure, primal feeling in a being, the push through everything. Through watering eyes and heaving stomachs and the urge to vomit. Through a spinning head and deafened ears. Through pain and horror.

It was fight or flight. It was live or die. It was make it to Blair's pub of find her grave with a cyborg who she did not know, who she was risking everything for.

It was everything in her that forced her teeth to grit down, jaw clenching as she wailed low and lay his heavy body over her, making her way behind a tree and heaving, clinging close to the edges of the grounds as she forced herself to keep working, to keep moving.

Not much farther, she kept telling herself, unknowing where she found it, but managing to scrape enough strength to scramble away, half falling as she raced down the streets, taking every dark alleyway she knew and mostly supporting herself against the walls with the cyborg silent on her side.

Everything started coming in and out of focus, going blurry and sick as she stumbles in the streets. At first glance, most would only assume her drunk, which was why a cloud of people only spared her one condescending look before they crossed the street when they saw her with, when his head was bowed, what they assumed was an even more drunk man. In her deadened ears, her eardrums having popped from the loud sirens of the trash-zone, she could only make out echoes.

It was a good thing it was dark, or the smudges of blood and grime on her would make her a dead giveaway, and the conversations about the alarms she managed to hear as she avoided crowds sounded scared and high-strung.

"Who could have-"

"Did someone break-"

". . .dead. . .?"

"Where are police-"

She continued finding her way against the dirty brickwork of yet another alleyway. And she was so ruined, she barely managed to recognize the entrance for salvation. Yet, the massive, painted pumpkin on the back door was a dead giveaway, and she fell against it so heavily, she thinks the entire pub could have heard her, even over the loud wailing of the warning bells and the radio music Blair always had blaring.

Yet, they didn't, and it it wasn't enough, and her hand came up weakly, trying to knock, but only managing to slap clumsily against the metal door. She shuddered, hiccupping and remembering that she had a key, but her fingers wouldn't cooperate with her, only shaking miserably when she tried to articulate them in any way. The fumes she'd inhaled made her oesophagus feel as though it had been entirely burned away, her eyes watering, nose likely bleeding from the radioactivity.

She wobbled on her feet, trying to support herself but finding herself dragging down, lower and lower under the weight of the cyborg, and she thought it was such a bad way to go. Right there, so close to being safe with the ring of the police cars screaming down the road.

Right on her heels. Right on their tails.

She was going to die there when she was so damn close but-

The door opened, a very confused Kim standing there, drying her hands off on her apron with her mouth open to inform Marie that she could have alerted the dead, but the second Marie loses the door as support, her entire body buckles and she finds herself collapsing to the well scrubbed floors of the Pub. The cyborg lands half next to her and half on top of her, and she clings to him as though he is her only buoy. In her haze, she realizes that she has at least had the good sense to twist about and make sure she didn't land on her side, because the parts she had in her pockets and her hip-packs were so valuable, so important, to fall on them and render them useless would be more of a tragedy than nearly anything else.

Her head is spinning, but she hears Kim's shrill voice calling for Jackie, calling for Ox, yelling for help. Marie's head can barely lift, and she finds that she doesn't have it in her to do so, only settling bonelessly against the floor when Kim grabs at her arms, pulling her out of the threshold and entirely into the bar before she scrambled up, slamming the door shut, deadbolting it immediately and telling Jackie to empty the bar.

Marie thinks she hears the faint clicking of heels, rushed and sharp, over the floors, and she must have, because the next thing she knows, the world is dizzy when she is flipped and Blair is hovering over her with more concern than ever before splayed on her face. Marie coughs and it sounds wet, her chest heaving and her arm numb with the cyborg crushing her. Through the swimmy haze in her head, she listens to Blair's voice though the sounds don't match up with her lips.

"Marie. . .are. . .okay? Ma. . .kay. . .are. . .rie? Are. . . .kay?"

Marie can only groan, her eye unfocused as the world goes blurry. Her mind refused to cooperate, and someone touches her leg only for her to hiss, kicking out before she's held down.

"Cauterized," she hears, though she can't make out the voice.

"And. . .-borg?" someone else asks, but Marie's arms are tight around the man, holding him to her and keeping his face buried in the crook of her neck.

"Is he. . ." she starts, coughing once again much to Blair's quickly mounting panic. "Okay?"

Blair's beautiful eyes spark with something before she's out of Marie's sight, and the next thing she knows, the feline-esque woman is commanding Jackie to empty the bar of customers, telling Kim to get the first-aid kit.

It was in a time like then that Marie remembered that Blair had been a volunteer field nurse; times like then that she is thankful she met people like Spirit, who could introduce her to women like Blair. But, for the most part, she could barely think, and she realized that her lips were moving without sound coming out when Blair kneels next to her and comes into her line of vision once more, starting to pull the cyborg off of her to get to Marie.

"Him. . .first," Marie insists, knowing he was in worse shape than she was, and when Blair opens her mouth to protest, Marie only tightens her hold on him and shakes her head, trying to make things sharpen but only making it worse. "Him first," she outright demands, and though Blair looks sorrowful, she nods.

When Marie finally let go of him, she knew he was in good hands.

The world went grey as his silver hair brushed over her face. Only after the fact did her vision go dark at the edges, everything fading into a black voice.

At least passed out, the pain lessened.

* * *

She woke to Blair's fretting, the other woman's slim fingers smoothing over her hair. For a moment, she went to lean into the touch, but winced immediately when her side protested.

"Marie?" Blair asked, peering down at her and ceasing her gentle tending-to. "Are you awake?"

Marie groaned, cracking open her eye and reaching her hand up to rub over her face. When her palm came over her skin, she found that she was missing her eyepatch, and with an experimental wriggle, she found that she couldn't feel her leg.

Oh, god. She couldn't feel her leg. And everything crashed upon her all at once. The frantic dash to the Pub, the cyborg and his constant "P-pl-please", the avalanche of scrap over the guards, the police sirens, the fence.

The fence.

She bolted upright immediately, despite the fact that her insides, as well as Blair, protested entirely, and threw the scratchy blanket off of herself to look at her legs.

Still there. Both of them.

"They've got enough localized anesthesia in your leg to kill anyone else," she heard to the side, and when she whipped her head around, it was Spirit, wearing a frown on his face the likes of which she'd never seen before. "We're lucky we've got Naigus, or you'd probably be dead from shock alone."

"Naigus?" Marie asked, and her voice sounded foreign and scratchy. "How did you get her here on such short notice?" Where "here" was, however, Marie hadn't pieced together just yet. When she looked around, however, she noticed Kim and Jackie huddled together in the corner, sleeping, and an exhausted looking Harvar slumped against the wall.

Still in the Pub, then. She shifted around and felt the seam of something on the back of one of her legs, and when she looked down, she realized that she had been lying atop two tables pushed together. Glancing back up at Spirit, still dressed in full police riot gear, he had a somber expression on his face.

"It's relatively easy to demand urgency when, oh, I don't know, you tell her that one of her best friends is dying! What the hell, Marie?"

Marie flinched, bringing the blanket back over herself due to the slight draft that was ever-present in Blair's Pub, but Spirit sighed, bowing his head and running a hand through his hair before he looked back at her.

"I thought you were dead when the station called," he told her, and she couldn't help the pang in her belly. After losing his wife, after losing Kami, of course he'd be worried sick. She couldn't blame him for being so volatile.

"I'm fine," she reassured, sighing and pinching her mouth.

"Well, that might be an overstatement," a woman's voice called, and Spirit glanced behind him to spot Naigus stepping out from the back area, wiping her hands. She must have just washed them, since there were still a few drops of water rolling down her fingers. "You had second degree burns on your leg. You're lucky you didn't need skin grafts."

"Yeah, lucky," Spirit snorted, finally settling his weight on one of the tables before Blair came up to him and sat down beside him, letting him lean on her.

Naigus stepped forward, bringing her calloused hand to Marie's bruised shoulder and gently pushing her down until her head was pillowed by what must have been someone's jacket. Marie knew it wasn't her own, since the smell of the fumes never really left cloth. Besides which, Blair would never be careless enough to keep something so noxious around a wounded person.

They must have changed her, especially if Naigus was there to take care of her injuries. Marie winced when she settled flat on the table once more, trying to find some kind of comfort for her tender body.

"You might want to be careful for a while. Your arm was nearly dislocated, too."

Marie's brows furrowed. "How did-" but she cut herself off with a gasp, her head swiveling around wildly when she realized that her arm injury was from dragging such a heavy form around for so long. "Where's the cyborg? Is he okay? What happ-"

"Whoa, whoa!" Spirit called, immediately jumping from the table to come console her, and Naigus's gentle press on her shoulders got more urgent to hold her down. "Sid has him," Spirit soothed, and when he stepped to her right side so she could see him, his entire, young face looked aged with how concerned he was.

But it placated Marie. No one could transport someone undetected better than Sid could, and many a cyborg had found their freedom through him.

Yet, she realized that Spirit didn't answer her second question. "Spirit," she started, but the man's eyes went to the side. "Spirit! Is he okay?"

Spirit chewed on his lip for a moment, sighing through his nose when Blair brought her hand to his shoulder. Naigus rolled her eyes and let go of Marie, stepping back.

"He's being taken to Azusa. She couldn't make it here in time with all the police patrolling the streets. You've got everyone on lockdown."

"But how can Sid-"

Naigus only raised a brow and Marie sighed, calming her worrying. She knew Sid was the best at what he did, and whether the streets were crawling with cops or not, the man was stealthy enough to get anyone through to near anywhere with no damage. The panic was just so natural and easily welled up.

And if Sid was taking the cyborg to Azusa, that meant he was in worse shape than she thought.

"So, what's the plan?" Marie asked, forcing her muscles to relax.

"For now?" Spirit asked, "Or long-term?"

"I don't think I handle long term right now," she muttered out.

Spirit's chuckle was heavy, but at least it lightened the room. "Well, for now, then, just sleep and let Azusa do her job."

Marie's smile crooked small and dainty on her face, a delicate curve of a thing. "A sleepover, then?"

"Yeah," Spirit said, his torso shaking with his slight laughter when he came to ruffle her hair.

Marie's smile dimmed down after a moment as she thought to herself. She didn't knew why she was so invested in the cyborg being okay. She was invested in every cyborg being okay, but she'd never put so much at risk for anyone before.

Maybe it was because he asked her to. Maybe it was because he needed her, and she had always wanted to be needed. Maybe it was because he reminded her of why she fought so hard.

If he was with Azusa, he was in good hands, and the weariness in her body tugged at her, again, her eyelid lowering while Naigus stepped around her, to her blind side, to fiddle with what must have been a make-shift IV line.

He would be okay. She would be okay. All of them would be.

She had to believe that.

And the pub was silent.


	2. But I Turn Him On

**Evidence File #13 for Case 3419**

 ** _October 20th_**

 _Naigus was mostly concerned over nerve damage. I'd taken worse. My leg cauterized itself immediately from the holo-fence. It could have been worse._

 _I'm more concerned about the cyborg. He was in such bad shape._

 _That pleading. . .it was unearthly. I don't know what he was pleading for. It felt so pained._

 _Every time I breathe, I think my chest is trying to tell me it hates me. The painkillers help, a little, though I've been hobbling around more often than not._

 _Giriko is going to be a pain to deal with. I don't think I have it in me to bite down and keep silent for much longer._

 _Sometimes, I want to throw him through a wall._

 _Most of the time._

 _Mostly when he talks to me._

 _Or anyone else._

* * *

Marie couldn't take any days off from work. Her leg was still injured, and it hurt so badly when she walked that it felt as though she had fire licking at her skin with every movement, but if she requested a sick day so close to a run, they'd absolutely knew it was her. Or they would suspect her and she was a shit liar.

The news reported nothing of a blonde. The only people that had seen her face were, she assumed, the two dead guards who had been found under a pile of rubbish so heavy, it took a truck to take them out from under it.

Unrecognizable, the programs said. Mangled, brutalized.

Security would be even higher, but Marie knew she wouldn't be going for another run for a while, which meant they had to go on what they had on them for any repairs, and considering she'd personally shoved a new patient to the top of their list, that meant that they were going to be out of commission for a little while while Spirit worked his way through stripping the small parts she'd managed to drag back.

Nonetheless, Giriko had bitched about it for days at the lab, and Marie kept her head down, nodding occasionally while she worked through the synthesized serotonin samples.

"Fucking Vultures, goddamn shithead idiots-" and more of the same.

She'd learned to tune him out, most of the time, only working silently as his unwilling assistant on the Synthempathy project. It was only when Arachne would show up, her crisp, low voice asking how it was coming along that Giriko would revert to something that even resembled eloquent.

He was closer to the level of a drunk man trying to explain quantum physics, but at least he wasn't raving, and it was in those moments that Marie could actually find some semblance of information to report back.

But there was nothing. No reports she could give when she hobbled her way to Azusa's small abode after work, taking the cramped bus that led her through the winding streets of what had been nicknamed Death City, what with their cyborg toll count.

She supposed it was a good reason that she wasn't visiting Azusa for pleasantries, or for an information session, either.

It took three days for her to finally find a slot when she could check on the cyborg, and she was so nervous, she felt like her stomach was going to eat itself when she gave Azusa a call on her outdated device, having gotten off three bus stops before her home so as not to draw any unwanted attention.

Everyone was taking note of where everyone else was going, and Marie made sure to cut through the bakery Killik worked at, being ushered around silently in the empty shop so that anyone who had spotted her would simply assume she'd gone in for a cake.

Azusa already had her door open when Marie got to her home, and she was brought inside with a definitive click of the barrier shutting behind her.

"Is he-"

Azusa only sighed. "Hello, Marie."

Marie had the decency to blush slightly in embarrassment as she followed Azusa to her humble kitchen-area as Azusa grabbed up a mug and handed it to her, taking note of the dark circles under Marie's eyes. She'd been so worried the night Marie'd brought the cyborg in that she interrogated Sid for nearly half an hour as she worked over the cyborg, her sharp glare poking holes in Sid's very soul as she asked him for every detail.

It seemed Sid was right. Marie was a little singed, a lot bruised, but she wasn't The Pulverizer for nothing. She would be fine. Azusa sighed, sipping at her drink as she watched Marie fidget, and after the blonde opened her mouth once more, Azusa cut her off.

"Something was removed in his coding," she informed, taking a deep drink of the sludge that was meant to pass as coffee. Azusa knew that Marie wasn't there for pleasantries, so it was best to cut right to the information that she was actually interested in.

Marie seemed to freeze. "What? Azusa, what? Removed?" Marie asked, her throat constricting as she stepped forward. "But that means he's. . . physically alright?"

"For the most part. His parts are functional."

"But his coding?"

"Lacking."

"But how. . .?"

"I don't know. But it's a lot."

"Located where?" Marie asked, her entire body steeling once more for the bad news. Azusa toyed with her mug and Marie set her own to the side, looking at her best friend in concern. "Where?"

"In the hippocampic region."

Marie bit at her lip at that, her golden eye widening. "But that would mean he'd be-"

"Emotionless. Yeah, that'll do it."

Marie winced. Ever since the law passed that all automatons with emotional capabilities were exempt from human experimentation, she'd seen more than a few cyborgs that were built without them, in order to bypass the strides made in cyborg rights. But to remove them? It was cruel on a level Marie couldn't even stomach.

"Is he okay, at least?"

Azusa shrugged, fiddling with her mug and looking at Marie deeply. "Dependant on definition."

"Can I see him?" she requested, a worried tone seeped in her voice, and Azusa looked over her face before she nodded, making her way past her close friend and stepping to one of her work rooms, her crisp shoes clacking over no-nonsense hardwood floors.

When Marie came to the doorway and took the sight of the man in, it was jarring. He looked. . . better than before, certainly. The harsh infection that had been bright red and stinging over his face when she'd first found him had been covered up with some synthetic skin, easy to peel aside in order to get to his hardware underneath, and he was outfitted with new parts. When she'd first found him, she could make out where metal met bone with how torn aside his flesh was, but the new snytheskin was so close to the texture of regular, the seam would be absolutely unnoticeable. Only the stitches that Naigus must have administered gave away the fact that he had to be pieced back together.

He was clean, finally, having been scrubbed of the grit and grime of a dump site.

He was a handsome man. She didn't expect that when she'd first found him, wearing only tatters of a face. But he was, and from her spot at the door, she could almost convince herself that he was just a regular man, asleep. Yet, when she blinked, the image of him so wounded flared back at her and she felt a fierce protection churn inside of her.

She would never let that happen again. Not to him. Not to anyone.

"Any idea on how the coding was removed?" Marie asked, glancing over how his body was sprawled out, wearing nothing but a pair of oversized sweatpants Azusa must have gotten from Spirit or Sid, and hooked up to the many old, repurposed machines Marie knew she found in bits and pieces.

Azusa was a master at putting things together, though the details of stripping them of serial and model numbers, the grit work, was all on Spirit's shoulders. The bespectacled woman sighed, removing her glasses to wipe off the ever-present dust the whirring of the outdated models kicked up with their fans.

"As much as it pains me to say it: no. We'll have to call in Spirit. This is more his business," Azusa informed, handing Marie her empty coffee cup so that she didn't have to hold onto it when she plopped down in front of her computer, typing in various things in order to safely unhook the lifeless mechanoid. Marie tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, setting the mug on the floor. When she stepped forward to start unplugging him, her fingers lingered moments too long on his skin, and the compassion that welled up in her, the yearning to just hold him and make him okay again was near-overwhelming. Instead, she only pulled the wires away, closing the ports and smoothing her hands over his flesh. She took great care to avoid the mug on the floor as she looped the wires away, winding them around her fingers carefully before she made her way back to the cyborg.

Azusa watched her friend from the corner of her eye. No doubt, the man looked far different

from when Marie last saw him: no longer corroded and burned at the edges, no longer a man made of pieces. Having looked him over, she'd realized almost instantly that, even if someone else, someone with more monetary goals, were to find him first, they'd be out of luck. If they stripped him for parts, they'd barely find much of anything.

And, on top of it all, he was entirely unresponsive, only eating up all the energy the makeshift generators were producing.

Azusa was bitter about having to give up most of her surplus, especially on a cyborg that might not even function. There were a million existing, needy people they had to help first. She still had to find a day that Naigus could come in so she could check him more thoroughly for necrotic tissue, radiation poisoning, anything dealing with the medical.

There were cyborgs who had to wait months to get an appointment with them, because their waitlist was just so long and supplies were so scarce: it amazed and baffled her that someone could cut in line just because Marie happened to stumble upon them. To call her so short notice wasn't fair, nor was it something they'd done before.

But Azusa knew Marie, and so did Naigus: the blonde woman would do anything for someone in need, especially if they had more need than others. And the man was clearly in need, more so than anyone else she could think of on their lists. She couldn't think of anyone she'd seen in the past four years that they'd found in worse shape.

Well, she could. But none that were alive.

Moreover, she couldn't deny that it was a very strange thing for there to be a cyborg with their emotions removed. Violently, it seemed, or at least, traumatically, if the coding had anything to say about it. After the hole, the lines were spaced farther apart, numbers looping furiously before slowly winding down back to what was commonplace. Were she examining something organic, she knew it would be pulsing and red, angry.

She'd have to tell Marie, but she was trying to hold off on the details of just how bad it must have been for the man. If the blonde knew how mistreated he must have been, she'd be adamant about helping him, which could simply prove impossible. Additionally, finding whoever did that would be a miracle: if they were strong enough to go in and demolish that much coding, there was no way they left a trace of who they were or where to find them.

There was no calling card to speak of, and she'd never seen something so. . . cruel inflicted on a cyborg before. Physical wounds were commonplace, from fights and brawls and abusive owners, but those things could be patched up and healed and repaired.

It was when it took place in the coding, when it was so traumatic and violent that it left a sore, gaping hole, that was the most heart-clenching.

There was no telling how damaged, he truly was. With that much coding missing, he likely wouldn't even wake up.

Azusa would tell Marie it was hopeless, but on the off-chance they could make progress, she knew that emotional removal was close to emotion synthesizing. And if they could prove that much, that those lines were arbitrary and easily changed, then they could make the case that it was equally as wrong to experiment on cyborgs of any emotional level. They could finally make more strides on banning the experimentation, making a case for a blanket-law of protection.

Azusa heard from Marie that Baba Yaga were in a standstill trying to create synthetic emotions in Giriko's lab. A good thing, since everyone involved knew if they actually did succeed, it would lead to nothing but sorrow. There would be no way that Arachne would let it slip into the public, and even if it did, she could somehow convince people that synthemotions were less valuable than true, and that could spell disaster for everyone in their resistance group, dubbed, ever so eloquently by Spirit, the Experiment Annihilation Team. Or E.A.T, for short.

Azusa finished saving all of the copied files, knowing how to do so by muscle memory. Her back was ramrod straight from stress, from thinking, parallel with her chair while she stroked over the keys.

Before she got too far ahead of herself, they had to get in contact with Spirit. She wanted to roll her eyes. He would know what to do. The man was an idiot on the best of days, in her opinion, but he could do detail work, investigation work such as what was needed in that moment better than anyone else she knew. He just understood how to read into things that other people wouldn't know how to. And once, if, he figured out how the coding was destroyed, then Marie would be able analyze his findings under the scope of the synthetic empathy research she did in Giriko's lab. Maybe something could spark from there. Azusa sighed, feeling the need to clean speckles off of her glasses once more, but refrained.

She just wanted their investment to pan out.

"You can leave him on the table," Azusa called back, shutting down the machines and welcoming the whir that indicated that they were slowing to a stop. She turned around, her side twisting so she could look at Marie.

In the moment that Azusa's gaze settled, she noticed how her best friend whipped her hand close to her chest, as though she'd been caught doing something. Like a child with a hand in the cookie-jar, or something equally as silly. Marie was a grown woman, she could do as she pleased, so for her to look so guilty was more ludicrous than anything else.

But then Azusa raised a slim brow, realizing that the blonde's palm had probably been on the man, smoothing his hair from his face, patting his shoulder. Comfort tactics.

Good God, she had latched onto him that quickly? It didn't matter how many times the woman got burned, she simply refused to let her kindness be guarded.

"He isn't a puppy, Marie," Azusa told her sharply, more concerned over her friend's well-being than upset at anything.

Marie winced, looking down. "I know," she said. She had a nasty habit of getting too attached, too invested, and then when things didn't pan out how they should, she got moody. Reckless. It was why Azusa couldn't tell her just how terrible what destroyed his emotions must have been. If she knew that, if she made it personal and latched onto him even more, she'd be a whirlwind of hellfire and when she did that, she was downright careless.

They couldn't afford that. Not after everyone was on red-alert after the stunt she pulled to get the cyborg out of the dump site.

And what a curious thing that was, that he was there to start with. Usually, whole cyborg bodies, especially emotionless ones, would be shipped back to Baba Yaga so they could repurpose them for parts.

So, it wasn't Baba Yaga. That much was for sure.

Especially considering that worm best known as Mosquito was so livid when he found out about how two of his guards had died on the job. Four other Vultures had been found and arrested, Marie having been the only one who escaped, but Mosquito was still absolutely furious that the situation had to happen in the first place. It was always better to keep the public in the dark, making sure that they believed Baba Yaga had everything under control.

A company as a government. Azusa scoffed. Who in the world would ever think that was a good idea? But with faith in Baba Yaga shaken, there were new outcries for stronger fences, for more pay for the guards, for better guns, for more surveillance cameras. There was already an unspoken rule that Vultures would be killed on site, but with the public crying for blood, Mosquito had to act fast in order to twist it all into an act of terrorism that Baba Yaga was doing everything to prevent happening again.

As if the rebel groups needed any worse of a title.

Regardless, Azusa wasn't going to be comfortable sending Marie out on another expedition for a long time, least of all when she was finally healed. After having Kami taken from them for less, Azusa wanted to hold her friends as close to her as she possibly could.

They had a mission, a duty, yes, but they also had a responsibility for one another. Yet, she couldn't deny the fact that they had depleted nearly their entire inventory on the cyborg, repairing him as best they could, and their parts collection was so lacking, Azusa didn't think they'd be able to help anyone considering the circumstances. Moreover, the cyborg was really leaching the energy out of her generators, and if she ran out of fuel, they'd all be screwed.

There was no time for being tentative. None at all.

She knew Justin would insist that, as soon as Marie could run properly, she go back out there. She knew that Spirit, though reluctant, would see how bad their stock was, and realize that they desperately needed to bulk up. They could buy off the black market, where they usually got Tsubaki's parts, but their funds were pitifully low. Azusa barely had enough to pay rent as it was, same with Marie.

They could never ask Spirit, who was the only one who had more mouths to feed than just one. And speaking of him, they needed to get him on the job immediately. The small treasure-trove of parts Marie had managed to bring back along with the cyborg was desperately in need of being repurposed, and they would make up the bulk of their inventory for the time being.

Azusa shook her head. "Could you call Spirit?" she asked, blinking drowsily.

"Does he know the situation with the parts?" Marie responded. She knew that, since he was in such poor shape, they must have stripped their entire collection clean, and she was already reaching for the button on her earpiece, announcing 'Spirit' to the mechanized voice that put her call through.

"No," Azusa replied, having been too concerned with trying to keep the cyborg alive than in cataloguing parts at the time, deciding to hold off on telling Spirit.

Marie's smile was a thin, delicate wisp, more a forced twitch than anything else. "Still mad at him for pinching your ass?"

Azusa simply blinked at her, blankly, and turned back around to face her dark screens. "Yes. But I assumed you'd want to tell him yourself that it's because of you that we lost our entire inventory."

Marie cringed, her fist curling, tempted to throw a punch but she swallowed the urge, her gaze softening when she looked down at the unresponsive cyborg on the table. She glanced at Azusa, making sure the woman had her back to her before she allowed her fingertips to ghost over the exposed seam on his face again. She frowned, listening to the dial tone, waiting for Spirit to accept the call.

Removed.

She couldn't stand it. The thought made her very blood boil.

* * *

 **Evidence File #15 for Case 3419**

 ** _October 24th_**

 _Giriko was laughing during the newest attempts at the Empathy Project. He's getting fed up with administering usual doses of emotional chemicals, and tried to overdose a cyborg, today._

 _Her name was Evie._

 _I don't want to remember._

* * *

It turned out that Spirit couldn't come in for another few days since he was tied up at the police force, hiding and forging various documents to cover their tracks. Some of his coworkers were catching on a bit, but they trusted him enough to disregard any feelings of suspicion.

It was Spirit's tip-off that had Marie go straight to Azusa's place instead of coming to her home after work, since the police were going to be patrolling the streets once again. And since the two of them were there together, they were stuck poring over the coding. Frustrated. As per usual. At the very least, Mira finally called in and told them she'd be available that day, though it couldn't be for very long. As a policewoman, she could slide through undetected regardless of the beefed up patrol. Yet, she wouldn't be able to stay, not for much longer than twenty minutes or so, considering Sid was still at the station on the other side of town, and she had to meet up with him as soon as he got off work to talk about another patient and seeing what they could do about filing a case for the aggressive assault they were subjected to.

So, Azusa was polishing another part needlessly, looking down at the man, waiting for Mira's call. She'd taken him apart once again only to put him together, cleaned him of rust, replaced what had to be replaced. But there was something so strange about him that she just couldn't put her finger on.

"When is Mira coming over?" Marie asked, pouting as she went over the black hole of obliterated coding on Azusa's computer. Again.

Azusa shrugged, though Marie couldn't see that. "Half an hour, maybe. She hasn't called yet. It might be earlier." She looked down at the part in her hands, a piece of the port on his shoulder. It would have gone into a man called Tezca, had Marie not found the cyborg currently unresponsive on the table.

Unresponsive. Nothing about that made sense to her. He didn't have a speck of dust obstructing his wiring, all the parts were usable. In theory, they should have been able to plug him in and awaken him already. The fact that they could access his coding while dormant meant that he didn't self-destruct: he wasn't dead.

But he wouldn't wake up. It was beyond infuriating. When he first came in, she understood. He needed to recharge, she assumed. But even after draining half of a generator tank like a leech, he was still out cold. The gap in his coding would only make him emotionless, not useless. Marie worked with emotionless cyborgs day in and day out: there was no reason for him to play Sleeping Beauty.

With the way Marie kept looking at him, Azusa was tempted to ask if a kiss would rouse him. She'd certainly run out of any other options.

Azusa was deep in thought, but she didn't jump when her earpiece, that she'd left next to the archaic mouse on her desk, started to buzz and chirp. Marie, however, let out a small squeak and almost knocked the thing over when she whirled. Azusa jumped forward, snatching the device off of the desk before Marie could cause any further damage and checked who it was.

She let out a relieved sigh, connecting the call.

"Mira?" Azusa asked, her voice coming out tinny.

"I'm rounding the corner."

"Okay," Azusa replied, making her way out of the small control room of her house, hidden all the way in the back, so she could make her way to the door, opening it just as the other woman showed up. Naigus brought her finger up to her ear, disconnecting them, her eyes serious behind her zipped up collar, her ears trained for any sound of her coworkers, who were going to be making another round down the block any moment.

Azusa moved to the side, quickly letting the other woman through, sparing only two quick glances around to make sure no one was paying attention to them. She thanked the fact that the area she lived in was particularly abandoned, and closed her door, double locking it. Naigus already made her way to the room she was most familiar with, so Azusa found her way back alone, coming in to listen to Marie's offended scoff. Azusa raised a brow.

"He did not fight a chainsaw, Mira."

"He looks it," Naigus responded, tugging her jacket down so the cloth was under her chin and Marie could see the slight smirk pulling at her face, which went away as soon as she stepped closer to the man. "What's the problem with him?" she asked, knowing she'd looked him over just a week or two ago, having given Azusa medicine for his infections and any surface issues she'd managed to treat in the short time she'd gotten at Blair's Pub.

"We don't know," Azusa answered, coming to stand next to her. "His programming is intact, but he's unresponsive."

Marie looked over at Azusa when she said the word "intact", since it wasn't, but she knew what she meant. Nothing that was crucial to his functioning was compromised. She stood up, leaving to room to get Mira's bag of medical supplies so the woman could examine him.

Azusa came over, scooping up the part that she was polishing and gently setting it back where it should be, securing it and leading the wire to a different machine so she could monitor him.

As soon as that was done, Mira made a small sound in the back of her throat, leaning over and seeing what she could figure out without the use of tools. Her fingers found his mechanized pulse, steady. When she lifted his eyelids, everything seemed normal. Save for the seams, he was entirely whole, nothing missing, no chunks. She looked at where his flesh met metal, finding no signs of irritation.

Marie came back into the room with the bag in her hands that she set down next to the cyborg with a startling thump. Azusa would never get over just how strong her friend was, but that was a thought for a different day. She was too busy taking note of the look of concern that washed over Marie's face while Mira unzipped the pack, rummaging around, the expression not letting up even when Marie had to go back to her seat at Azusa's desk. Azusa double checked his wires, making sure he was plugged in properly and receiving adequate energy levels.

There wasn't much else they could do. If it wasn't a matter of coding or parts, it had to be physical. And if there was anyone who could diagnose and fix a physical ailment, it was Naigus.

Which was why they were amazed when, thirty minutes later, the dreadlocked woman pulled away from her examination and announced that there was nothing bodily wrong with him.

"What?" Marie asked, dropping the hem of her shirt that she was previously playing with. "Then why won't he wake up?"

"It's probably a neurological issue," Naigus told her, putting her things away.

"Well, what does that mean?" Marie pressed, standing up. Azusa's gaze cut over to her, already aware of her agitation. "He was fine at the pub! You wouldn't let Sid bring him here if you didn't think so."

Mira looked at Marie, her expression and tone even. "I could only check for a pulse then. His body is alive, but he's likely experienced brain death. His coding could easily direct his heart pump and lungs to keep working but nothing is going on upstairs."

Marie made a frustrated sound. "Wha-"

Azusa pushed off from the wall, her voice no-nonsense. She'd mourn her sucked-dry generator tank later, but at least it meant that the parts she'd invested in the cyborg could go toward others who required their help. "Marie. If he's braindea-"

"He isn't!" Marie cried out, whirling around so fast her long skirt almost tangled around her ankles. "He flickered when I found him! He told me to help him. He was pleading."

"It might have been a malfunct-"

"It wasn't-!"

"Azusa is right, Marie. The bolt through his skull could have-"

"No!" Marie argued, turning back around, her eyes finding the steel that protruded from his head. "No, it can't have! He wouldn't have talked-!"

"He could have. He still has coding and his body is alive even if his brain isn't. It's possible it was prerecorded," Azusa said, finally getting a word edgewise.

Naigus nodded. "Besides, why else would he have something like that through his skull?"

Marie's fist clenched, her teeth gritting down while her eye zoomed onto the steel visible around his hair. She took in a deep breath, blinking a few times while she acknowledged how true her friends were. They were right. That would explain why his calling was nothing more than a loop, the same tone, the same rasp, the same hitch in her ear when she carried him out. And, at the time, she'd been so busy trying to get them out of that potential graveyard that she hadn't taken notice of the bolt.

Why else would someone have a bolt in their head if not a means to kill them? She shuddered, nothing but fury in her bones for whoever would do that to someone. He'd sounded so broken when she found him, too. To jab a bolt through his brain: how heartless could someone be? And they were right. She knew that. Why else would he have it through his head?

But there was no blood. She remembered that much in clarity, since she'd been so focused on his face. Everything was clotted on his face, but his hair had been clean.

He was in such a bad state of disarray when she found him, but she'd seen many a cyborg in her day and not one who had that particular feature. She'd focused on it so heavily. And Mira didn't know that he'd had his emotional coding ripped from him, the trauma so heavy. She didn't know that whoever dumped him wouldn't have bothered to clean him of any blood.

The bolt. . . the bolt.

Marie stopped. Her eyebrows went up, mouth scrunching. "Why else?. . . a bolt. . . a screw," she whispered, suddenly jumping forward. A screw. He was part machine: could it be so simple for him to just have a screw loose?

Naigus leapt back when Marie raced past her, situating herself at the front of the table and moving the bag down onto the floor to better maneuver. Her fingers found their way into the gray mop, specifically feeling around the base of the steel.

"Marie!" Mira called, inhaling sharply when some of her supplies scattered over the floor. Azusa blinked, astonished when Marie let out a triumphant noise.

When her hand twisted the bolt, the wet, gurgle it gave off didn't prove promising. Marie felt some of the cerebrospinal fluid leak over her fingers, but she gave another rotation of her wrist, hope showing on her face.

Azusa stepped forward, but even she stopped when she caught sight of what was taking place on the computer screens.

The code stuttered, going entirely blank. There was nothing but a plain black screen showing.

But it wasn't the blue error screen that would flash at her if he was dead. No. He was simply empty.

Empty, that is, until Marie gave one more yank, making a grand total of three rotations of the bolt, and the coding began to rewrite itself. Immediately. Just filling up the screen and going on and on. It came to a furious halt when it reached the gap, twisting and blinking, before pressing on, leaving a sad, sore gape.

Mira gasped, her eyes on something else entirely.

Namely, the olive orbs of the cyborg. Open.

Alert and trained on the woman curled over him for a second time, her fingernails soothing his scalp, her smile radiant and glowing.

The lights above her bounced off of her golden hair, forming something of a strange halo, blurry since he didn't have vision correction working properly, not yet. And for a single moment, he could only see the sharp, cold eyes of the woman he'd last been in the clutches of, before he was shut down, before his system crashed. With a single blink, he was brought back. This woman was too different: too warm, too gentle as she caressed his hair.

She opened her mouth, voice lilting out. "Thank God," she said. "Thank God."

And his face remained blank. Lips cracking open then closed.

He couldn't find a single thing to say.

He found he didn't have a desire to do or say anything, actually.

So he brought his hand up, uncaring of how his massive palm entirely engulfed her own, onto his screw and twisted once more, finding some clarity. His face was smooth, expressionless.

His eyes remained focused up, at the golden woman's face, until her smile dampened.

* * *

He had been so apathetic to his situation, she didn't even know what to do with herself. He could hardly remember himself, couldn't recall his name, his prior memories, and he delivered all the answers with the most blank look in his eyes.

He refused to look at her. That much she realized instantly. He couldn't take a single second to glance her over despite the fact that she had been the first person to greet him when he opened his eyes. She was confused, but he seemed unresponsive to almost everyone else, too, so she didn't take it personally.

It wasn't like the cyborgs she was used to working with. They were cold and emotionless, but not monosyllabic. Azusa looked frustrated as she talked to him, trying to get some semblance of information.

"What's your name?" she asked, and the man jerked his shoulders up and down, a sad imitation of a shrug. Marie's throat felt tight.

"Do you remember where you were?" Naigus asked, having put aside all of her medical instruments and settled herself on the wall across from the cyborg, her keen eyes scoping out every single movement he made.

"No," he replied, and the tone was so empty, Marie couldn't help but flinch.

She wanted to know what had happened to him, what had hurt him so deeply, so traumatically. What he had gone through that left his voice a shell, a hollow thing that seemed both fragile yet solid, so secure in the emptiness.

"I'm assuming you have nowhere to go, then?" Azusa asked from the side, her brow lifted as she adjusted her glasses, and the man stared at her for a moment, his eyes focused on the longer ends of her hair, her bob short in the back yet coming into long pieces that framed her face. After a beat, he looked away, a though uninterested.

Because he was, Marie reminded herself. He didn't have the capacity for interest.

But he did, once, and that was the worst of it.

Azusa didn't wait for him to make a noise in the negative, already having known the answer before she asked the question. The woman's eyes met Naigus's, first, before they shifted to Marie.

"He can't stay here," she informed, her voice holding no nonsense. "This is my workspace. He'd only get in the way."

Azusa's lack of tact was flinch-worthy, and Marie opened her mouth to try to defend the man, but she knew it was true. He wouldn't be a help amongst Azusa's computers, and, if anything, he'd be more of a hindrance, since she'd have to hide him.

Naigus didn't even have to say anything to let the room knew that she wasn't going to be taking in the stray: between sharing a tiny apartment with Sid, and occasionally keeping patients in her living room, on her couch and her kitchen table as makeshift hospital rooms and beds, she just didn't have the space. It wasn't that she thought he'd be a liability, but rather that she couldn't afford to house yet another person in her home.

And Spirit, though he lived in a massive house that had room for three, would never put Maka in danger. To expose her to a cyborg that she didn't know, one they had no real idea of, it would be something Spirit would fight against to his dying day. If there was anything in the entire world that he would protect with his entire self, it was his daughter.

Justin was only sixteen, having dropped out of school to join their group, a genius, but still just a boy.

Which left. . . her.

Really, Azusa and Naigus didn't have to look at her so expectantly. She got the hint pretty quickly.

Yet, there was something about him that put her on edge, something about the way he refused to meet her eye, the way he had to glance away quickly. Down and away.

Like he'd been trained to.

Marie swallowed before she stepped forward, and at the click of her heels, he finally glanced up at her.

He didn't have far to tilt his head, considering just how small she was and how much of a hulking figure he had, but it was still a motion he had to make, considering he'd settled his gaze against Azusa's immaculately clean floorboards.

"Hello?" she started, as she did in the very beginning, approaching him with a slowness that felt like she was reaching for a feral animal, one that would bolt away at the slightest sudden movement.

An animal he wasn't, but skittish, certainly. He barely tensed, as though going on nothing but muscle memory, though no panic was shown on his face, and she swallowed down her sadness for him at the fact.

"My name is Marie," she told him, holding her hand out. "If you'd like, you can stay with me until you find a place to go?"

The offer seemed to echo in the room. It was less a choice on his part, and more a semblance of one, an imitation of option. He seemed to realize instantly, though he didn't even lift a brow at her small speech.

He was smart, she could tell, and his gaze slowly lowered until he seemed like he was examining her fingers. Ringless, she realized, and calloused. They weren't much of a sight. Her hands had never been her most beautiful feature, as her mother had pointed out to her on many an occasion, but they were capable, and she was proud of the things they had done.

Or, rather, she was proud of the things they had done when she had a choice in the fact.

His eyes flickered up her arm, settling over her shoulder until he took in her face.

She was too different from the original visage that flashed across his mind, when he'd first awakened and found her staring down at her. She was warm, and golden, a rosy woman swathed in all black, her hair the color of a sunflower, rather than that of dead hay.

There was nothing. . . snakelike about her face. Instead, she was rounded where he had once envisioned angles, and her caramel eye was concerned and kind.

After a moment, he looked back at her hand before shrugging once again, as though it didn't make much difference to him, one way or another.

And it didn't, not really. It was either going to her home or...

Or, what?

He had no idea where he was from, where he had been found, what had happened to him. He tried to examine his memories but found them shrunk away from him, as though he were blocked, in some way. Though he had a hard time finding comfort in his skin, he realized that particular reaction wasn't one he was used to.

His body had more muscle memory than any other sort, so he had to trust it.

Inside his head, something was laughing at him, and when he looked down and to the side, having determined that the woman, Marie, was satisfied with what eye-contact he had made. For a single second, he wanted to curl his shoulders in.

His body did, at least. He didn't truly want to do anything.

He wondered what it would feel like, to not have to. To not be forced into speaking, reacting, talking.

There was no desire to live with the woman.

No.

There was just no desire for anything.

The emptiness gaped in him, leaving a massive chasm he had no means to fill.

And the silence stretched and stretched and stretched.

* * *

Naigus had to call Sid and tell him that she would be late. It seemed that everyone was making all too many adjustments for the man that Marie had found in the scrap heap, the one without a name, the one without serial numbers, the one without a model stamped on him.

Azusa told her, when she pulled them all to the side away from the cyborg, that he reminded her of the original cyborgs, the ones that started off as people with organic lives before becoming machines. The ones after them, however, knew technology in their very bones mere moments after their births, but the cyborg Marie had found, he had no semblance to them.

Not much, at least. He shared the lack of emotional center that the freshest bots all had, that same blank stare, the same indifference, yet he had a coldness that felt more artificial and unworldly than anything else.

He reminded Marie more of the children she'd worked with at the Trauma Centers, back before she became an Engineer. Volunteering was good for resumes: that's what her teachers had said. But Marie had gotten too attached, took her work home with her and refused to let it leave her bones. The depressed, the suicidal, the ones who lashed out with a fury that was nothing if not justified: Marie wanted to cull everything in her chest out just to make a safe-home for them, just to have them experience something other than horror.

She couldn't. Not then, not ever. Having left, it was the hardest decision she had ever made. But, young and naïve, she thought she was moving to bigger things, a place where she could make a difference to several people, not just a few.

How she wished she'd stayed with those children. How she wished she never joined Baba Yaga.

Those were all things for the past, however, things she could not change. Things she didn't know if she would or would not change. What mattered, then, was that she had a man in desperate need of help and all their safe-havens had been occupied by those who came before him: the ones who had run, the ones who had hidden, the ones that had come, pounding and yelling and sobbing, at Azusa's and Naigus' and her door at all hours of the night. The ones who were already trying to pass their way into society.

But when she looked at him, remembered his reactions, he wasn't like them. He had asked for help, yes, but not in any usual way.

He asked for help, back in that would-be-could-be graveyard as though he were begging for something else, something Marie had no way of understanding.

He asked for help like he was told to.

She shook the thought away as Azusa dug around in her closet, trying to find clothes for the cyborg. Usually, it wouldn't be much of a problem, since no one would question a group walking down the street.

Not unless one of the members had such obvious cyborg features. The screw through his head and his obvious seam-lines were a dead give-away, and Marie knew Azusa didn't keep too well stocked in the men's clothing department, considering any of the lovers the dark-haired woman had would be of the much more female persuasion.

Naigus picked up a plaid button-up and lifted a brow, checking the tag and finding that it was a female's large.

"Would this work?"

"We could try it," Azusa replied. "He's scrawny."

She wasn't wrong. But there was no way that the shirt would fit over his shoulders: he wouldn't even be able to lift his arms. Marie shook her head, rummaging around in a drawer. Sometimes, when Spirit and Justin would hole themselves at Azusa's home, they'd leave behind jackets and such.

Whether he got a shirt or not was irrelevant: so long as they covered him up properly, they'd be fine. It was a bus ride to Marie's house, but if he was dressed well enough, no one would question them. She'd have to drag him to the very back.

She hoped he didn't have any sort of motion sickness. That would be the last thing they needed.

Marie finally found the sleeve of one of Spirit's suit jackets and she lifted it up with a triumphant "Aha!" just as Azusa managed to fish out a beanie that she hoped to whichever deity was still listening would be enough to cover up the screw.

A hoodie would be the best option, but that wasn't really a possibility, considering the only boy that they'd had around the place who wore them was Justin, and the kid was as slim as Marie was.

"It'll have to do," Naigus said, straightening up and rolling her shoulders. "I can walk you to the bus-stop."

The appreciation showed on Marie's face. It wasn't that it was a bad area: it was, but Marie had always known how to hold her own against everyone and anyone. It was that with Naigus still wearing her Police-Patch, she'd ensure that no questions were asked in the short, four-block walk to the bus stop closest to Azusa's house.

Thankfully, Marie's apartment complex was practically right in front of a different stop, so she'd be able to sneak the cyborg in with only a few lewd comments from someone everyone only ever called Auntie.

Good Lord, she'd never be able to live it down. She could imagine the comments come the morning, when Marie would have to go to work again.

As soon as they got him to her home, everything would be, more or less, fine. She'd have to go and find some other clothes to put him in, since he'd need them. He had nothing to his name, and she knew, from working at the trauma center, that sometimes, just having something to call your own was enough to make you feel better.

Yeah, she'd have to go to the store after work, the next day. Besides which, he wasn't going to stay with her forever, and they'd have to find a way to either take him to a safe-house, or work out a means of legal protection.

Or integrate him as human-passing.

Though it was the most effective, long term, it would take more work than anything else. A bot like Tsubaki, one who moved like water, one who could smile and pretend like it was genuine, one who could smother down her hurt with a soft giggle, that was plausible. Tsubaki's path to human-passing included four years of finding proper skin grafts and working out internal generators that Naigus spent 6 months working out a surgery for.

For a cyborg like the one in the next room, such a path could prove absolutely impossible. She was fretting over taking him to a bus stop with a policewoman walking with them, since he was so. . . obvious. He'd have to work on emotionally passing before he could even hope to be human-passing, and being just emotionally passing wasn't enough to escape the harsh interrogations, the terrifying treatment that cyborgs would get.

If he could emotionally pass, it wouldn't be an issue, getting him to the bus stop, to her apartment. Those bots were allowed outside without ownership papers, but emotionless cyborgs had to have proper documentation and a human being walking with them.

Even with Naigus next to them, it might not be enough to prevent Marie getting stopped for some sort of identification and proof of ownership.

But she'd never have proof of ownership: she didn't believe it was possible to own someone else. She didn't believe it was right.

Regardless of what she believed or didn't, Azusa grabbed up the clothes that they had collected, determining that the workout pants that she had found before he was awake and responsive would simply have to do, and left the room.

When she left, Naigus looked over at her, folding her arms and sitting herself down on Azusa's bed.

"You're nervous," she commented, and Marie sighed, running a hand through her hair.

"I'm still hobbling and I'm about to smuggle a cyborg with no emotions or identification to my apartment on the other side of town. Why wouldn't I be?"

"You'll be fine. Getting to the stop will be the hardest part, and I have my badge with me."

"And after?" Marie asked. "What's the long term plan?"

"I thought you couldn't handle long term," Naigus threw back, evading the original question and bringing Marie back to when she had to spend a night at the Pub under her and Blair's care.

"I'm serious, Nai. He can't pass."

"We'll have to do what we did with Crona, then," Naigus responded, playing with one of her dreadlocks and looking over the time.

"What? Leave them to rot in a safehouse while their assault case is permanently 'pending'?" Marie replied, bitterly.

Crona's situation would always be the cruelest to her. It would always make her want to fight, fire licking in her bones.

Naigus sighed, closing her eyes for a second.

Marie always got too invested, too fast. Couldn't let things go. She knew that, she had always known that. No one got into a resistance group if they didn't feel each thread of yearning for justice.

That didn't make it any easier to deal with. It didn't mean Naigus didn't get exasperated with her friend.

"Let's focus on getting him to your apartment, first. We'll go from there," she commented, pushing herself off from the bed, and Marie frowned, wondering why she wasn't more concerned, considering how unique the man's situation truly was.

But then, Marie remembered. Naigus couldn't have known that his emotional coding was removed. She must have just assumed that he was an emotionless cyborg, just like the ones Marie worked with, day in and day out. For a moment, Marie wanted to scowl: Azusa was a woman who was known for her exemplary skill in details, and yet, she tended to gloss over them more often than not when it came to reports.

Still, it could prove easiest to gather her, Sid, Justin, and Spirit in her apartment with the cyborg after she managed to get him to her apartment, in order to tell all of them all together instead of having to give the information one at a time.

She felt bad for keeping Naigus in the dark, but it wouldn't make any difference to the situation they were in, at the moment. The dreadlocked woman was right, anyway. The first priority was getting him out of Azusa's house and in a place where he'd be able to find some sort of familiarity.

Besides, after Joe left, Marie's apartment had been relatively empty. It would be nice to have someone take up the space, even if just in presence with no conversation.

Marie had gotten all too close to investing in a cat or fifteen just to have some sort of constant company, so she figured that she wasn't losing out on anything by having him in her home. And once he was there, she'd be able to work out some more plans in what they could do for him. An assault case could be some sort of progress, but since he had no semblance of self and no memories, it was going to be a long road to any sort of progress. Beyond which, the law always had a way of sucking the life out of everyone involved.

No, she determined, she'd have to work something else out, for him.

When Azusa walked back in, stretching her arms and looking to be in desperate want of another cup of coffee, Marie met Naigus' gaze.

"Ready to go?" Marie asked, wiping her palms over her long skirt, and Naigus gave a curt nod before the two of them made it over to the door, passing by Azusa.

When her hand met Marie's arm, the two of them looked at each other.

"Be careful. . . please?" Azusa said, as she always said whenever Marie was going to do anything dangerous, and Marie smiled, bringing her touch over her closest friend's hand.

"Of course. I'll call when I get home, okay?"

Azusa nodded, once, letting her arm drop to her side.

"He's in the living room," she told them, and Naigus walked forward before Marie did, her footsteps clean and purposeful across the floor.

Marie took in a deep breath before she followed her.


	3. And He Comes To Life

It was only because of Naigus' police badge that Marie suspected she wasn't in jail. It had saved her ass on multiple occasions, the most recent being at the bus stop. She was only allowed on after her close friend flashed her badge and stared down the bus driver, enabling Marie and the cyborg to scuttle by, the emotionless man's head bowed and turned away so there were fewer witnesses to what he looked like. After managing to stumble to the back of the near - empty bus and enduring less than casual glances from the driver, Marie had finally reached over and yanked on the cord that alerted that she was ready to get off at the next stop.

How she managed to run her way up to apartment number 654B was unknown to her. She didn't believe in any deities, but it seemed as though one of them must have believed in her, because she and the cyborg had somehow slipped past the deserted stairwell and took all six flights without encountering a neighbour.

She supposed most people were too cautious now-a-days to slip off after dark. The reports of vultures and police in full-blown riot-gear must have spooked most people, and for once, she was near-thankful of the fear mongering.

Only when she shut the door behind her, having ushering the cyborg in ahead of her, could she breathe easily, and she peeled off her jacket, setting it on the hook before she whirled around and found him standing in the middle of her living room.

Her apartment was nothing to scoff at, though it certainly wasn't impressive, by any means. She grasped the front of her shirt, carefully fanning herself with it since she nearly sweat through the material with the terror of what could happen if anything went wrong.

It was lucky. They were lucky.

Or, rather, she was lucky. He seemed like he'd seen better days. Luck was likely something he'd scoff at, had he the means.

Marie took in a deep breath.

"Home sweet home," she said nervously, swallowing when her voice warbled. She was a little tired from the six flights of stairs, her short legs having to keep up with his far longer stride, and he had taken, not two, but three steps at a time. He only turned to look at her, blankly, his eyes unblinking for a solid thirty seconds.

She nearly cringed. "Do you. . . want some water?"

"I do not require it to function."

She paused, looking at him, and something akin to tenderness must have come over her face because he turned away, as though unwilling to look at her.

"I know you don't need it. . . but do you want some?"

"I cannot want anything," he informed her, sounding every bit like a machine: some sort of recording. It seemed like a well-practiced phrase, something he had said multiple times in the past, and she felt something hot and angry in her bones toward whoever had him in their clutches before she found him.

She wanted to insist that he could, but when she looked at him, it seemed as though his shoulders tensed.

When she blinked, it was like she had imagined it, and she licked her lips, suddenly dry.

"If you don't want any water, that's okay," she insisted, deciding to let it drop. His throat must have been parched from being in the landfill and unconscious for so long, but one of the features of his programming was that, being only partially organic, he could survive without human needs. Still, to believe he couldn't want anything. . .

She had the distinct urge to comfort him in some way. If not through food or materials, through touch. But as her hand twitched by her side, she clenched her fingers into a fist.

There was no telling how he'd react to anything. She had to take things slow. They didn't know each other.

But she had dragged him through hellfire, her leg still burning from the wound she took from the holo-fence. He might not have known, might never know, but she cared.

And beyond which, she had a responsibility to him, now. She chose that, so she didn't get to make it about herself. If he hadn't even shaken her hand when she offered it, back at Azusa's house, she doubted he would appreciate a hand upon his shoulder just a few hours later. She breathed in through her nose, her eye drooping slightly as she observed his back.

"It's late. . . The couch pulls out, if that's okay by you? I'll go get you a pillow," she said, slipping by him to her bedroom, knowing that she hoarded frilly pillows and multiple sheets due to how often she redecorated. Her entire apartment was a happy shade of yellow, but she had gone through a pink phase only a few months prior, and the happy shade might do something to his mood.

She hoped.

When she walked back in, holding the massive bundle of bedding, he only looked at her. She offered up a thin, delicate smile when she set down the pile, moving her table to the side so he'd have a place to sleep.

He didn't help her.

And he said nothing.

* * *

 **Evidence File #23 for Case 3419**

 _ **November 1st**_

 _No progress on the empathy project. Giriko chewed me out for almost falling against the table when I went to get the norepinephrine. Jackass. It feels like everything is slow and swimmy when I'm on the painkillers, but it's the only way to walk properly._

 _Finally managed to get in touch with Justin and figure out when he can make a meeting. Everyone else already cleared a day. It feels like it always takes Armageddon to have all of our schedules line up._

 _The cyborg is doing about as well as could be expected. Still not comfortable eating or drinking anything I offer. I keep leaving food, but it's always untouched. I'm getting worried that his organic components will be compromised._

 _I can't make out what batch he would have been from. He seems like he fits in better with older models, but his hardware was new, according to what Azusa sent me._

 _I think he'd flinch every time I walked into the room if he had the means. It hurts to know that._

 _Spirit's been scratching his head over all the info. Sent a group chat that he couldn't trace the parts. They're good for nothing but scrap, they were so damaged. Azusa's been using it as spare fuel for the generators._

 _Leg's throbbing something awful._

 _I wish I wasn't out of sick days. There's too much to be sick about._

* * *

It wasn't really an emergency. At least, that was what Spirit was grouching about, hands in his pockets as the group of them settled in his miniscule kitchen while Sid made them coffee. They could have waited, they didn't need to take action as though they were all going to die in a few hours if they didn't. At the very least, he grumbled, Maka was out at a friend's house.

What Spirit was trying to hide the girl from, Marie couldn't know. Maka had already forged a relationship stronger than steel with Crona, and any chance she got to visit the other teenager she took. Maka was already deep in the resistance movement, having developed a strong aversion to politics, and getting more than one detention for speaking out of turn. The girl was opinionated, strong.

She reminded her of Kami. She even wore the same hairstyle. Marie could tell that Maka despised the safe-houses just like Kami did, commenting more than once how they had the impression of the old-world prisons she observed in her textbooks, but she knew that her father and Marie and all of their friends did everything they could to ensure that the people housed in the safe-homes were comfortable. It was that same grudging acceptance that made Marie nostalgic for her close friend.

Marie supposed Spirit just wanted to shelter her, like he couldn't shelter his wife. She couldn't begrudge him that much.

He sighed, settling his weight against his kitchen island while Naigus and Marie sat on his table, only prompting the barest of eyebrow twitches from him. Azusa, among the most logical of them all, had gone the boring route and actually settled into a chair.

Like a normal person, she'd said, rolling her intelligent eyes to everyone else's half-hearted chuckles.

Sid finally came back with the last two mugs of coffee, handing one off to Justin before he settled next to the boy against the wall. After a single pause, in which everyone looked at one another, Justin let loose a cough as though to urge everyone on.

"So, the meeting is a go, hm?" Spirit snarked, sighing through his nose before he took a sip of his caffeine.

"Looks that way," Naigus replied, having already finished the last of her drink and leaning her elbows upon her knees. "Is this about that cyborg Marie took in?"

Marie flinched. "You talk about it as if I've adopted him," she muttered, averting her gaze.

No one replied to that much, and the quiet felt oppressive in such a small room. Marie looked around before she closed her eye, leaning backward. "Fine, whatever. Yes, it's about him."

"Got back from my sources. No one's reported a missing cyborg through any of the underground systems," Justin informed, blinking his bright blue eyes at Marie. The boy had such an unnerving, electric stare.

He could have been an interrogator in another life. Or an executioner. With a stare like that, it was no wonder he could pry information out of anything. When he didn't have his headphones lodged into his skull, that was.

"Nothing through the official routes either," Sid informed. "Any good tracking a serial or model number?"

"He doesn't have any," Azusa admitted, adjusting her glasses.

"Not even on any of his internal parts?" Marie asked, somewhat taken aback. Even if he didn't have the tattooed coding on some part of his body, he had to have a traceable number somewhere in him.

"Even his skeletal structure is intact," Azusa revealed, having had access to what of his metallic skull had been exposed.

"I couldn't find anything in my examinations either," Naigus added, tilting her head to the side. "What about in his actual coding?"

Azusa looked at Marie, the two of them sharing a sharp glance. It was clear that the younger woman expected the blonde to inform the room, and Marie blinked a few times before she put her cup to the side, avoiding everyone's gaze.

"About his coding. . . it's been compromised."

"As in hacked?" Sid asked, his mouth pinching.

"As in destroyed," Azusa provided. "Part of his coding was traumatized."

"How traumatized?" Naigus asked, her eyebrows coming together.

"Traumatized to the point where he lost his emotional center."

Spirit sucked in a gasp at that, the air suddenly becoming heavy. "Are you sure they were traumatized? Are you sure he just didn't have them to begin with?"

Azusa looked at him in annoyance, irritated at having her credibility questioned. "Of course I'm sure. Do you find me some sort of amateur-"

"But that means he had to have had emotions before being. . . traumatized. Experimentation on emotional cyborgs is illegal," Sid pointed out.

No one said anything for a good few seconds, taking in the information. Of all the mistreatment cyborgs had to go through, experimentation was one of the few things they had protection from. Even Baba Yaga wouldn't dare to mess around with experimenting on anything other than the emotionless. Their massive amounts of money weren't enough to convince the public if the news ever got out. After all the trials, it was one of the few progressive steps in cyborg rights, their protection from abuse.

To think someone had violated that law was more than chilling.

"This is a police case, then," Spirit said, his voice steely. Naigus shook her head.

"No, it isn't. How do we describe how we found him, Spirit? 'Oh, my friend was just strolling through the landfills,'" Naigus mimicked, dropping her voice.

"We don't have to mention the landfills," Spirit argued back. "The police force has the means to deal with this. This group doesn't. It's over our heads."

"His radioactivity is a dead give-away. He's going to need at least a few months to have that removed from his parts," Azusa mentioned.

"Not to mention the trauma his organic components took on from being there. It's a good thing he's mostly machine, or he'd be fucked," Naigus added, as though backup. Spirit clenched his jaw, and if Marie looked hard enough, she'd see the slight motions he made as he grit his teeth before he opened his mouth once more.

"Fine, a few months. Give him a few months to strip the radioactivity out, and then we'll take him in under a proper report."

"And then what? The examiner is bound to find our parts. And he'd be in too good of a physical condition to warrant any concern," Azusa pushed back.

"Well, what do you propose, then? Leave him with Marie? As though she has the funds to support two," he argued, and Marie bit her lip.

"We could do some underground work," Sid offered, causing every head to swivel in his direction. "Try to trace who did it, forge the documents at the stations."

"Lord Death isn't fool enough to think he overlooked documents about a cyborg experimentation case," Spirit urged. "The last time one of those was in the books was twelve years ago."

"Lord Death has cut shady deals in the past," Naigus informed. "He's just concerned about the image of the department and getting paid. He doesn't want his son in danger."

"He'd get heat from the rest of the department. Baba Yaga would be furious they weren't kept in the loop. They have the patent on all the cyborgs, in case you forgot. We're required by law to inform them of any cases that go through the stations involving that patent," Spirit spat.

"And if we find out they'd violated the law and committed cyborg experimentation? Baba Yaga wouldn't be a problem anymore," Marie added, bitterness seeping into her voice.

"It wasn't Baba Yaga," Justin finally broke in. "They're not good enough to get away with it entirely undetected. They're too massive."

"So if not a police report or undercover work, what? We act as vigilantes? This is a major case; it could force the law's hand to extend protection to non-emotional cyborgs," Spirit added, his eyes looking tired. "We can't sweep it under the rug. Sweeping Crona under the rug was bad enough."

The room was quiet at the mention of the pink-haired child. They were the case twelve years ago that proved fruitless. Marie looked down, playing with her fingers. "This is why we're here," she started before she looked up and caught the gaze of everyone else. "We need to think of what to do."

"Well, we can't do what we did with Tsubaki. He can't pass as human," Azusa said.

"He can't even pass emotionally," Naigus put in, sighing and closing her eyes. The dark circles beneath them were too permanent a feature recently.

Marie swallowed, her eyelid drooping over her warm, caramel eye. "So, what do we do?"

"The only thing we can do," Naigus started. Marie looked over at her, biting her lip.

"We wait."

* * *

 **Evidence File #32 for Case 3419**

 ** _November 3rd_**

 _I asked Sid to do some more digging on facial recognition in the cyborg databases. It feels like we'd have to go farther back than we would expect. The missing reports gloss over a lot of stuff. It'll take a while for him to get back to me, but it could be a lead. Those databanks are massive._

 _The cyborg doesn't seem to like me very much. I know that's silly, since, with his emotions compromised, he doesn't have the means to like or not-like anything. Still, the way he acts around me. . . it's almost like I remind him of something unpleasant._

 _Maybe of someone? Who knows._

 _Was looking over some old notes from the beginning of the Empathy Project. So weird. The notes were barely legible._

 _Picked some new flowers to put into the burned out memorial candle._

 _Her name was Candice. At least, that's what her file said. Made specifically for Giriko's new "fear therapy"._

 _He makes me sick._

* * *

She decided not to wait to get him proper clothing. If he was going to be living in her home, she wanted him to have something to call his own. After grilling Spirit for half an hour and putting his number on speed dial on her earpiece, getting his sizes for various brands, she went ahead and visited one of the nearby shopping malls.

The cyborg seemed a little slimmer than Spirit, though his shoulders were equally as broad and he was just as tall. He was just. . . malnourished. In more ways than one, she thinks bitterly. Malnourished of care, of food, of energy.

She sighed, clutching the large bag to her chest. It ate up half of her paycheck, but she figured it was worth it. She wasn't going to half-ass anything, never had a need to, and she knew from her days working at the Trauma Centers that anything someone could call their own was powerful.

She wanted to give him power. And if that came through a pair of jeans, then so be it.

When she walked into her apartment, he seemed to be in the same spot he was when she left, and she couldn't help but frown.

"You can turn the TV on, you know?" she said, almost wincing at how her voice broke the general silence. His head turned from staring at the wall to staring at her, and she pinpointed the exact moment that his gaze shifted to the bag she was holding. Marie locked the door behind her, shrugging out of her jacket and stepping forward until she was in front of him, moving slowly.

"I went to the store. I didn't know your size, but I hope it all fits," she told him, gently setting the bag down in front of him and stepping backwards to give him space. She thinks his eyebrows twitched together, but when she blinked, his entire face was still the smooth, passive expression it had always been. She chewed on the inside of her cheek. "If it doesn't fit, I can go back-"

"What do you want in return?" he asked, robotic and blank. Something in his eyes looked so dead, as though he was weary from the very idea of having to ask.

"R-return?" she asked, her eyebrows coming up. At the Trauma Centers, no one had expected anything in exchange. They had nothing to give.

His eyes lifted to lock on her own, and she almost shuddered at how empty they were. Her lips turned down.

"I don't want. . . I don't want anything in return," she assured, something in her weeping at having been asked.

He only continued to stare at her, as though trying to call her bluff, and she felt like she wanted to squirm out of her skin.

"I just thought. . . if you were gonna stay here, you could at least be comfortable."

"I am not," he said, words falling heavy in the room. Her frown deepened, but it had no affect on him.

"Well. . . then I wanted you to have something of your own. . . everything in that bag is yours, if you want it," she informed, softening her voice.

She was never good with words, but if she could have a name for the expression he was wearing, she thinks it would be mistrustful.

"Listen," she started, sighing and fidgeting about from where she was standing in her living room. "You don't have anything to call your own right now, okay? I wanted to give you something. Think of it as a gift."

"It is not a holiday," he deadpanned, and she almost wanted to giggle out of nerves.

"Well, happy birthday, then," she responded, jokingly, trying to lighten the mood. At that, he said nothing, his eyes flicking back to the bag though he made no move to touch it.

A few seconds went by before she sighed through her nose, turning around. She heard rustling almost immediately, and she felt her eyebrows go up before she whirled around and found him holding up the extra book she had picked up for him when she walked by one of the novelty shops that still had old-world things. Most people read things online, or had them read to them, so she had very few true books printed on actual paper in her home.

He was holding Frankenstein in his hands, staring at the cover, and only in that moment did she realize that it might be taken the wrong way.

She opened her mouth to explain that she wanted him to have something to occupy his time when she was at work, but his expression seemed to morph and she almost gasped when there was a flicker of pain and. . . something that looked like recognition on his face.

She didn't know how long they remained like that, with him holding the book in his hands, staring at the title, reading and rereading, his eyes flicking over the cover as though obsessively.

She just knows it was too long to be anything but important.

* * *

 **Evidence File #40 for Case 3419**

 _ **November 9th**_

 _He still doesn't seem to remember his name, but "Frankenstein" seems to call out to him. Indication of recognition can't be confirmed through tangible evidence, but he reacts to being called "Franken" or "Stein". Considering he doesn't know his name before I found him, and he's found familiarity with "Franken" and "Stein", he's given me permission to call him that._

 _It's almost a little silly. Codename: Franken Stein. I feel like I'm in a novel, or something. Still. . . I'm glad he has something to refer to himself as. It felt so impersonal to call him "Cyborg" over and over again. As though that was all he was._

 _Azusa asked if I'd be willing to bring him over for another scan in a few weeks when Naigus would be over to help remove the seam's glue on his face. I don't know when I'll be free, but it feels wrong just to ask me. I'll ask the cyborg ["the cyborg" is scratched out] Franken in the morning._

 _There's something weird about him. His reactions are similar to how an emotionless bot would respond but there's something stilted in his responses. Might have to bring it up to Azusa, but she's been so stressed, recently. Haven't gone on a run in a while and we're almost out of fuel in the generators. Justin's been haggling on the markets, but it's so much cheaper just to get it ourselves. I don't want to bother her with anything since she's so preoccupied. Besides, I don't have physical proof. If it's something in his coding, she'll be able to find it._

 _No progress in the serotonin mutations at work. Giriko is getting impatient with no results. I wanna tell him to go fuck a chainsaw._

* * *

Weeks later, she realized that Stein didn't sleep. Not when she was in the house, at least. Part of her couldn't blame him, but the majority of her was aching over the fact.

Comfortable, Azusa had stressed to her, quietly, after the examination. His coding revealed that he wasn't getting any shut-down, and he was eating through energy faster than one of those old computer monitors. He was going to overheat if he didn't give his body a break. Something akin to a fever was spreading to his organic components, and there wasn't medicine on the market that he could take for it that wouldn't compromise his technology. Stressed was the last thing he was allowed to be.

Since they could do nothing else, Marie's home was meant to be a safe shelter until they found a spot in a safe-house for him or worked out some other means of help.

Comfortable her ass.

How could he possibly find comfort in a stranger's apartment, in a place where he was unaccustomed, in a home that he could not call his? Weeks had gone by and his shoulders still had that tensed, on-edge feeling to them. He denied food, water, sleep. He had no needs for those things and she wondered if, in his denial of such, he was proving he was self sufficient.

Whether he was trying to convince her or himself, she couldn't know. She didn't think she wanted to.

She hadn't expected him to jump for joy, no matter what, but she did think they'd progress beyond shrugs and her one-sided questions after the first month of living with one another.

"Hey?" she started, struggling to close her door behind her with so many bags in her hands. "I'm home!"

He said nothing, as he usually did and she finally managed to close the door, turning around and setting the various bags onto the floor so she could peel her jacket off. Upon looking over at her couch, she realized that he was immersed in his book once more and her eyebrows went up.

She didn't have much information on the matter, but she knew that emotionless cyborgs had no need for leisurely reading. They had no desire for such, and Stein had said from the very beginning that he didn't have the means to want.

But there he was.

Something was strange. There was no indication of change when he went to visit Azusa and Naigus with her, not in his coding or physically, but she could feel something was shifting. She had always been more in tune with the intuitive. Not like Azusa or Naigus. They needed numbers.

She just needed to feel like something was shifting. And she always trusted her feelings.

"Stein?" she asked, trying to get his attention so she didn't startle him as she walked past.

His head slowly lifted and she focused her singular eye on the cover. He made no noise to indicate that he had heard her, not even a grunt, but his stare cut through her entire body. She gave him a soft smile, but she couldn't help a confused churn in her stomach.

"Frankenstein, again, huh? I'm glad you like it!"

He continued passively staring at her, only shrugging his shoulders in indifference, and she kept her gaze locked on him for a moment longer than most would find comfortable, her eye focused on his glowing, artificial green orbs. When he blinked, somehow making his deadpan even deader, she jolted slightly.

"Oh! Sorry," she said, nervously fluttering her hands around before she scooped the bags up from the floor. "Just spaced out for a second," she reassured, swiftly making her way to the kitchen where she could drop the groceries she had picked up on her way from work. "Are you hungry?"

She knew if she turned around, he would only shrug, once more, so she simply set everything down, instead. "I'm making spaghetti. I guess it's a good thing I have a roommate since I always make too much. Leftovers for days, you know?"

The sound of pages turning stopped.

"I am not your roommate," he said, and it was so cold, she thinks her blood froze in her veins.

She swallowed.

Cold she was used to. But there was something else in his voice that seemed different from that. A spark, volatile and almost dangerous.

"Huh?" she asked, turning around to look at him, feeling his gaze on the back of her head.

"We occupy the same housing, but I am not your roommate," he repeated, but this time, it lacked the bite.

It lacked the bite that had definitely been there before.

"Right," she said, sucking in a deep breath, feeling her fingers twitch. "Right. I'm sorry."

* * *

 **Evidence File #52 for Case 3419**

 _ **November 15th**_

 _[illegible, scratched out paragraph]_

* * *

For the first time in months, she slams her door shut so hard, she wonders if it breaks, but she doesn't care.

She doesn't even have a word to describe how she feels about the "fear therapy". She thinks she's going to vomit. The entire bus-ride to her house, she wanted to claw the skin off of her hands.

Once, she thought they were bloodless. Now she knows she is an accomplice, no matter how grudging.

She doesn't have it in her for flowers or a memorial candle. She didn't even get the cyborg's name that time. The file didn't bother giving him one. But when they wheeled him in, she thinks something in her had jolted.

Marie barely spares a glance at Stein, sitting on her couch with that same book in his hands, but through her watery gaze, she thinks he flinches.

She doesn't have it in her to analyze that either.

The emotionless bot had stared at her the entire time, something accusing in his eyes. The bot Giriko tortured. The electricity, the fried circuits, the smell of molten metal, the sound of a bone breaking.

She doesn't want to think.

Her steps are harsh and furious as she runs to her room, the fragment of a sob on her tongue.

If she looked at Stein, she would have seen his gaze follow her, as though curious.

She isn't tired enough not to feel his eyes on her, though.

She wants to be alone.

* * *

 **Evidence File #56 for Case 3419**

 ** _December 1st_**

 _Emotional outbursts disturb him. He's seemed more jittery recently. I don't know what to do about that. Or even why he's getting more responsive._

 _No one would believe me if I told them, but [scribbled out text]_

 _He's finally gotten comfortable enough to eat. We've been visiting Spirit a lot, for general maintenance on surface hardware. He's the closest and the police force has finally slowed down a bit with no heavy vulture activity recently._

 _Leg still throbs, but it's getting better._

 _The Empathy Project is winding down. Arachne is getting frustrated over lack of results. Giriko's in hot water over not being able to elicit a response from any cyborg he's had in his lab. Who KNEW that hurting people wouldn't get positive results?_

* * *

She doesn't know what she did. One second, she was talking to him, like normal. One moment, it was a calm conversation, regardless of how one-sided.

The next second, the instant "poor dear" slipped from her mouth while she was talking about the news, he was up on his feet, lashing out, something feral and angry on his face

Marie was so stunned, she didn't know what to do for a good few minutes. Was she imagining it? What had happened?

And then she knew. Or, rather, she didn't know. She only understood on the most superficial level.

His emotional center was compromised. Traumatized.

He went through trauma.

She had triggered him. She had triggered him and he had whirlwinded his way into the living room, which was his room at that point, and she felt something in her sink down deep.

If she could look at his coding, she knew it would be pulsing in pain. Sad and furious, angry, trying to protect itself with a harsh, flared up shield.

She stays in her kitchen, staring forward, staring at the half-eaten meal for at least ten minutes, trying to think. Trying to clear the jumble in her head.

She doesn't know what to do, not with him. He's delicate in a way she can't tip-toe around, but resilient and steely at the same time. He makes her uncomfortable, even in her own home.

The small spat they'd had (if one party shoving away and flinching and snarling as the other sat dumbfounded counted as a spat) made her stomach feel like it was knotting into a noose. When she still worked in the Trauma Centers, she went through such things in the past.

But she was out of practice. She felt transported back to the first time it had happened to her, back when a small girl called Rachel had struck both of Marie's hands away when Marie went to touch her shoulder. She had stormed off, angry and hurt, pained and broken, and Marie had no idea what to do.

She had no idea what to do.

Did she ever?

She remembers what a nurse had told her, all those years ago, when Rachel had stormed off.

 _"It's okay, Marie. . . it wasn't your fault."_

Marie brought both her hands to her face, pressing one palm against her eye and the other to her eyepatch.

 _"Could you go see if she's okay?"_

The clock ticked, and the sound seemed to echo.

 _"Talk to her, but not at her. Say you're sorry."_

When she finally made her way to her living room, she spots him sitting on the couch, staring blankly ahead at the turned off television.

For a moment, it feels as though they're only going to watch a movie, and the false domesticity was so painfully artificial it made her throat feel like it was compressing in on itself.

She felt. . . nervous. She took in a deep breath before she walks through her doorway, making her way to him.

"Hey?" she calls out, but he doesn't turn to her and she can see his shoulders tense as though he's preparing for another fight. Instead, she makes her voice even gentler. "Hey? Can I sit here?" she asks, as she always asks, but this time, his head whips up. Nothing is shown in his expression, but for the briefest of moments, he seemed. . . surprised. Slowly, he nods his head, as he always does, watching her motions. Marie sits down next to him, making sure she isn't touch him.

"Thank you," she told him, looking to the side for a moment. Still no conversation, and when she glances back at him, she finds that he is looking at her.

His stare is unearthly. She almost wants to shiver, since she feels visually dissected under his olive gaze. Awkwardly, she quirks a smile, hoping humor could help.

"Do I have something on my face?"

"No," he tells her dryly. Her grin wilts and she looks down at her hands. No good. Just being next to him didn't seem to do anything to make him feel better. She sucks in another inhale through her teeth.

"Listen. . . I'm sorry, okay? I didn't know- I just. . . I'm sorry. You're in a really crappy situation and-" she cuts herself off, biting her lip. "I'm sorry."

He only shrugs, a sharp, mechanical motion as he continues examining her face. The nerves bubble in her and she feels like she's being observed like a lab rat. She is reminded of Azusa almost instantly, of her unnerving stare when Marie first met her, when they were just young girls on a playground.

She'd never had a friend before and Marie was one of the most popular kids in the entire school. Azusa thought it a trick, Marie's compassion. She didn't believe she was being genuine. And just like then, Marie blurted out the same phrase, the same means of trying to reassure her. The same thing she had said to Rachel, all those years ago.

"Can I hold your hand?" she spits out, cheeks warming. Back then, as a child, it was to show Azusa that she was unafraid of the entire school seeing them, knowing that Marie had decided to be friends with the younger know-it-all everyone teased and whispered about behind her back. This time, it was just for physical comfort. That was what she was good at, what she knew best. Crona had responded positively to hugs and hands on shoulders. Almost all the cyborgs she had ever worked with found her touch gentle and kind, taking pleasure in just being held or treated with dignity.

But, instead of a nod, instead of being surprised, instead of lifting his brows, his voice was cold.

"Why?"

She's taken aback, confused. "What?"

"Why do you want to?" he asks her again, gaze unnerving. She fidgets when she meets it, and he watches the line of her throat as she swallows. No one had ever asked her before. Then again, no one had ever been so. . . damaged, both physically and emotionally. No one she'd worked with before had been in his situation. Of course, they were traumatized. How could they not be, having lived in such a cruel world. But they had just found it amazing that someone would willingly touch them with friendliness after all they had gone through.

The words felt clumsy on her tongue.

"I. . . people find it comforting."

Something sparked in his eyes, though there was nothing in his voice that indicated fury. It was something else this time. "Don't fool yourself into thinking you're altruistic," he demanded, and it shot through her.

Her eye widened at the fury in his voice. "Franken, what-"

"You asked because you want to feel needed but I don't need you. I hadn't asked for your damn help," he informed her, turning his head so he was staring straight ahead once more. Were she a poet, she could describe the feeling close to a breaking in her ribcage, a smash of that delicate glass house. But she wasn't. She was an engineer, and she hadn't ever been good with words. Or with hiding things.

Ironic, she thinks. That she was constantly made fun of for being so over-emotional, hysterical, they would call her, in the same room as a legally emotionless man. Instead of humor, however, it only saddened her further.

She closed her eye, holding down the urge to flinch before she stood up.

Perhaps space was what he needed from the get-go. Maybe her ex-boyfriends were all right, that she was smothered, that she crowded, that she didn't know when to back off.

She would back off.

"I. . . I'm going to take a shower. Is that okay, Franken?" She tried her hardest to keep her voice even, gentle.

She didn't see his shoulders come up and down once more, jerking, as though he were a puppet on a string, but she expected it this time, and she woodenly turned to walk out of her living room. He didn't move while she found her way to her bathroom, and she was thankful of that. Though, she wouldn't have assumed he'd go after her.

She didn't live in a fairy tale or a movie. There would be no hand around her wrist from him, no "Wait," no "Stay?" no tender touches or apologies. Not then, at least. Maybe not ever.

It was wrong of her to want that from him. It was wrong of her to push her feelings, her comfort tactics on him. He deserved better. He deserved to feel safe.

The lock clicked behind her and she turned on the shower, only allowing the welling up in her chest to explode and the tears to come down, hot and fluid over her cheek, after the sound of her sniffles could be covered up. Her empty socket burned with a phantom pain, and she sat down on her closed toilet to set her elbows onto her knees, letting her bury her face in her hands.

Disgust.

He was so disgusted. By her, by her actions, by everything about her, maybe.

It was so cold from him. He was so cold in general, but that particular emotion read loud, clear. Unmistakable. In the back of her mind, she realizes that it's progress. She realizes that he had been making progress the entire time.

His coding might have been coming back.

His coding was coming back.

His emotions were reconstructing from the bottom up. He might never reach empathy, he might never be able to. But he was repairing himself. Repairing. It was monoemotional, but it was emotional.

And it _hurt_.

To imply she was being selfish, that ached so deeply in her. Her leg had just recently, finally, healed enough, though when she took her pants off, she saw the shiny pink scar-tissue she'd be left with for the rest of her life. She'd never be able to wear a short skirt, again. The burn would be so recognizable, people would instantly be suspicious of her. Her body had recently stopped protesting each movement, each pull. She'd opened her house to him, opened her fridge to him, her hand to him.

Selfish.

. . .But wasn't she, in a way? She knew touch wouldn't placate him: she only did so because she didn't know what else to do. She hadn't known what to do with Azusa, with Rachel. She never knew what to do. But it had worked with them, in the past. She thought it could work again. It was the only way she knew how to be around people. She wanted to hold him and comfort him with that since it made her happy to know he wasn't in pain: and wasn't that selfishness, in a way?

She remembers when she first found him, how his voice rasped, "P-pl-please," on a loop and she had to help him. She had to. Because if she left him there, collected as a broken man under too garbage, thrown away as though he wasn't a living being, she could never forgive herself. She would live with it for the rest of her life.

 _"I hadn't asked for your damn help."_

She bites down, preventing a sob, forcing her tears away until her shoulders were trembling with the effort. He did. He'd pleaded with her. Or perhaps he was pleading with the world for a second chance, or for mercy. "Please" was prayer in her book. It was still faith, in a way.

You had to believe there was someone who would listen. Justin showed her that there were many different ways to have hope, to have faith. A cross at a throat, a star, a covered head, a glance at the heavens, a shrine, a bow, a begging stare.

A plea.

She had been there, by chance, by luck. No one could tell how long he'd been there, though the radioactivity of his old parts had traced at least a few days worth of fumes, so for her to show up was a miracle in of itself. For her to find him was against all odds.

And she had to believe that she was helping him.

He deserved better.

 _"It's okay, Marie. . . it wasn't your fault."_

The sob that came out of her mouth felt jagged.

She just didn't know if what she was doing justified as such.

* * *

 **Evidence File #60 for Case 3419**

 _ **December 7th**_

 _Giriko finally noticed the gaps in the files for the Empathy Project. I'm gonna return them to the archives tomorrow after Spirit finishes copying them at the station._

 _He doesn't believe me. I knew he wouldn't._

 _The files don't lie, though. Even under torture, no cyborg has shown that level of emotional response unless they had properly working receptors. Spirit didn't find anything out of the ordinary when we went over. Stein seems to be. . . uncomfortable with the idea of having to open up. He shuts down the second he leaves the house._

 _Hell, sometimes, he shuts down when he's still in it._

 _Who can blame him? I wish I knew what happened to him._

 _I don't wanna pry._

 _I don't have the right to pry._

 _Finally managed to gather enough dopamine from the labs to hand off to Justin to haggle on the markets. Spirit wanted to try a test for chemical reactions in Stein but I didn't feel comfortable._

 _He isn't a lab rat._

 _I don't care how much evidence we'll get out of it. I'm not using him like that._

* * *

Things had been so. . . stilted after that. He acted as usual, as though nothing had happened, and Marie shoved her feelings to the side. There was no room in their dynamic for spite or grudges, she couldn't hold what he did against him.

But she had proof that he was improving. It was amazing, honestly, that his coding was coming back at all, but it seemed as though, after his moment of anger, it was returning at a rapid, accelerated pace. Just a few days before, she had found him looking confused at something.

His walls were coming down.

And it was obvious that he didn't know what to do about it, that he didn't appreciate the ache that emotions brought. And, really, there wasn't anything volatile about him. It was just that he had no filter, no protection from his emotions. It was either everything bubbling up the surface, uninhibited, or nothing at all.

She was both unused to being around someone so open and guarded, and yet, proud over the progress he was making.

Part of it was unnerving, but the majority of it was fascinating.

She knew she couldn't go to a library for answers: his was the only case she had ever heard of, a cyborg with his emotional receptors removed. Her eyebrows twitched as she stared down at her journal, tapping her pencil over the page before she sighed and leaned back, the small light from her bedside table making her strain her eye.

She couldn't help but connect him to the Empathy Project, which was on thin ice. What he was doing on his own was what she was trying to synthesize.

Marie bit her lip.

Hard.

* * *

 **Evidence File #67 for Case 3419**

 _ **December 14th**_

 _Started to watch old-world movies with Stein. I wanted him to have something other than Frankenstein to preoccupy his time. He prefers the Sci-Fi, especially Blade Runner._

 _Maybe it was selfish of me, but the Rom-Coms don't seem to be much up his alley. Still, they could help him weed through his emotions. There's nothing like a good melodrama to help work through some kinks._

 _Alright, so he was bored the entire time._

 _I don't know why, but he's been. . . easier to be around._

 _It must be him working through his emotions, even though he's still really monotone, most of the time._

 _I don't know, I feel like I want to spend more time with him. He makes me feel like everything could be okay [this entire section is poorly scribbled out]_

 _No news from Baba Yaga. Everyone on the Empathy Project is on pins and needles. There's been talk about cutting the staff. No one knows where half the files have gone. Levels on the chemical testing came back that more is being used than is being accounted for._

 _I hope it all burns._

* * *

It took a stupidly long time for her to feel comfortable enough to go to Azusa with the news of his development. She was too concerned that the woman wouldn't believe her, considering how logical she often was, but she had the proof right in front of her, and after she stepped into Azusa's house, having settled on the couch across from her, she fidgeted around with her cup before she didn't take a drink from it, only setting it in front of her, on the table Azusa kept.

She didn't even blink. "I don't have any news in regards to the safe-houses," Azusa provided, looking as though she wanted to yawn. Not because she was bored, but because she was just that tired. Marie scrunched her mouth to the side, somewhat offended that her close friend would assume that she'd make the trip all the way to her house just for such arbitrary information.

"I know," Marie said, and Azusa's sharp gaze seemed to bore into her.

"So, you're here for pleasantries?" Azusa asked, already knowing that wasn't the case, and when Marie opened her mouth, she cut her off. "Or is this about what you told Spirit, a few days ago."

Marie flinched. She hadn't asked the man to keep it hush, but she didn't expect for the news to travel so fast.

"Marie, Spirit looked him over, he didn't notice any changes."

"He doesn't live with him, 'Zusa!" Marie insisted, the overwhelming urge for her to stand up crashing through her body. "I can tell, he's changed. He's changed a lot."

Azusa shook her head, leaning over so she could set her own cup next to Marie's. It wasn't that Azusa didn't trust Marie's expertise: if anyone at all understood emotions and emotional wiring, it was Marie Mjolnir. Her master's degree wasn't just for decoration, after all. Still, Azusa knew that Marie had a habit of attaching herself to people, to ideas, and it was more than obvious that she was planning on integrating him as a human-passing cyborg.

It was a pipe dream.

"Marie-" Azusa started, only to be cut off when Marie's eye flared.

"Azusa, I'm telling you! He's fixing his coding himself!"

"Marie, that's impossible. His emotions were singed away. Unless you've worked out something in the Empathy Project, he can't have his emotional coding replaced. Let alone fix it himself."

"Listen, if you just opened up his data bank, you'd see."

Azusa stopped at that, looking at Marie as though she had two heads. "We don't have any power to waste. You haven't been on a run in a while. The generators would run out before we even had him connected. He's like a leech."

Marie winced. It was all true. Cold, hard, rationality. "Azusa, please. I could go on a run. This could be revolutionary."

"You didn't make any progress on the Empathy Project in all your time of working at Baba Yaga. There's no way to create emotions in the emotionless, you know that," Azusa urged. The last thing she wanted was to risk Marie going out for another run when the last time she did so, it ended in such a horrific injury. She could have died twelve times over.

"This is the only case of his kind!" Marie said, finally standing up to relieve some of the passion bubbling through her. "He could be organically reconstructing his emotions!"

"Marie. . . are you sure you aren't just. . . imagining the change? Spirit told me he couldn't find anything to support what you said."

"That's why we have to open his data-bank," Marie said, still standing, seeming to tower over Azusa's seated form.

As much as Azusa didn't want to think about it, to pass up the opportunity to look him over would be foolish. She wasn't lying when she said they barely had any juice. The generators had been all but sucked dry from all the various check-ups that they had performed, and after so many fruitless looks at his coding, Azusa had decided to conserve energy by not looking anymore.

Azusa sighed, removing her glasses. Without the obstruction, Marie could see the pure fatigue on the other woman's face. The frustration. Some disappointment. But Marie's face was entirely set and she didn't look like she was going to budge up.

"When we get more fuel in the generators, I'll check," Azusa said, cleaning the lenses. She always did that when she was annoyed, or nervous. Marie nodded slowly, and Azusa squinted at her to better see the motions.

Marie face bloomed in relief, her skin seeming to glow. "I'll give Spirit a call and see if there are any plans to let up on the security."

"Don't bother. Sid told me everyone is working overtime for the foreseeable future."

Marie finally sat down, smoothing her palms over her skirt. "I guess I'll bring something over for Maka as soon as I can."

Azusa nodded, placing her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose. "Tell me when. I can come with you."

The other woman made a small noise of agreement before she looked over Azusa's expression.

"You don't believe me," she said and Azusa sighed again, heavily.

"I'll believe it when I see the coding. From what I've observed, he's the same."

"He isn't."

Azusa's eyes pinpointed onto her friend's singular, looking for something. "What have you observed?"

Marie almost flinched. The brunette must have spent one too many days with Joe back when Marie was still with him. The man did the same thing, those damn interrogation tactics. It was half the reason they broke up, after he told her he couldn't trust her.

It still felt a bit fresh.

Marie closed her eye.

"He's gotten. . . irritated. Which means he's started to get angry."

"It's the easiest emotion," Azusa pointed out. They both knew it. A cyborg that had anger but nothing else was still classified as emotionless. It was the empathetic emotions that really got them somewhere: that cyborgs could feel sorrow over others, happiness.

"I know," Marie said, but she'd already started to try to work on those as best she could. He had a fondness for books, from what she could see, and after she saw that he was starting to work through the emotional spectrum, she decided to take another step.

She thought that movies could help. He seemed even more bored with them than anything, but she hoped it could spark some sort of interest in him, some spark. If he had emotions at one point, he had to have experienced something in the films, and maybe they could trigger a feeling long-since removed.

Every night they'd settle on her ratty couch and watch films he seemed to have no interest in, old Action and Sci-Fi movies, and Romantic Comedies from when the world still had something worth being loved for. They were cheesy, sappy things she got too emotional over, and he would flinch every time she made a single sniffle, as though the very idea of her being sad was repulsive to him.

One day, she hoped he'd stop flinching. But, for the time being, she was actually thankful he had irritation in him. It was better than apathy.

Anything was better than apathy.

And. . . she couldn't help but feel more connected to him, despite his less than savory reactions. Partly because she was spending more time with him, though it was overwhelmingly in silence, but also due to the fact that he stayed.

He stayed with her.

Frankly, he didn't have much choice. It was remain with her or walk into the maw of a world that would slaughter him, but she had a feeling that if he was truly furious, frustrated to that point, he wouldn't take the time to watch with her. He would rather the open mouth of a slaughterhouse.

Though, she partially understands that she could be fooling herself. Perhaps he didn't care, after all. Perhaps she was making up the flinching, making up the anger, making up all his emotions.

She couldn't be absolutely sure until they checked his coding.

Marie wrung her hands, her voice still determined. "It's something, Azusa."

Azusa's brows were meeting closer to the middle but she said nothing as she looked at the warmth having settled over Marie's face.

If her friend was getting attached, too attached, that was on her.


	4. Automatic Joy

**Evidence File #94 for Case 3419**

 _ **January 18th**_

 _Stein's been reading all my old college textbooks. I knew there was a reason I kept them around, other than the fact that selling them back wouldn't get me anything. He's been curious about everything._

 _I can tell that no one really believes me about his emotions coming back. It's been months and Azusa still refuses to accept it. He's the same around everyone else, but I live with him._

 _His curiosity is the most. . .prominent thing._

 _Is curiosity an emotion?_

 _Finally going on another run tomorrow. Leg's healed up enough so that I don't have to grit my teeth each time I butt against something. It's a little numb, honestly. Naigus was worried I'd have nerve-damage. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise._

 _I didn't want any of the skin grafts. No use, at this point._

 _Though, I guess Stein and I would match. Planning on watching Bride of Frankenstein soon. I hope he'll find some kind of amusement in it._

* * *

He was flipping through _Emotive Theory and Technological Neuropathy_ for the fifteenth time that night. He counted. Because there was nothing else to do. For what must have been too many times, he flicked his gaze to the clock Marie kept hanging in the kitchen, and watched as the minute hand ticked, forcing the hour hand to shift, once more.

It had been six hours, fifteen minutes, and twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six seconds.

No word.

He inhaled through his nose, looking back at the same paragraph. She'd missed her show. The one she always watched when 8 pm rolled around. She missed the re-run that took place at midnight, too.

Or, she was missing it.

His fingers twitched against the pages of the massive tome he had found in one of Marie's several bookshelves. Save for the paperback novels with a half-naked male human on the cover, there wasn't much else to read save for those books. He wasn't feeling up to listening to an audio recording on the digital books.

The fact that she had physical books at all was surprising in of itself. She must have been attached to the old world.

He felt an overwhelming itch in his chest, one that made him want to expel breath, a heavy sigh through his nose as he focused back on the printed words on the page.

Paper was scarce, he'd read, in _Environmental Advances and Ozone Depletion_. The irony was overwhelming.

 _Prototypical cyborgs had the sensations of touch removed through severe nerve damage, often via burning or acidic flaying. Organic flesh was often replaced with ineffective rubberized skin-synthetic. The electric-based motor functions were impaired as a result, overheating taking place within-_

He leaned back on the couch, his mouth twisting up. Marie had left angry notes on the side, in a bright pink pen. Her penmanship was sloppy, the word "Sick" underlined multiple times with an arrow leading to "acidic flaying".

He brought a hand to his face, feeling over where the seam on his face had originally been. He didn't ever really want to look at himself in a mirror, but he had spotted his reflection a few days after Marie had herded him into the apartment and found himself examining the sloppy stitches that held his flesh together.

When he pressed his fingers to the flesh just beneath his eye, where he knew the syntheskin was, it felt the same as the rest of him.

He must have been too preoccupied, staring at nothing as he pressed his fingertips to his face because the knock on the door was both unwelcome and surprising, and he lifted his head, setting the textbook to the side before he stood.

Something in him felt heavy as he walked to the peephole, spotting Spirit on the other side. He was fidgeting, his hands wringing around and around.

Stein looked at the clock once more.

Six hours, twenty-seven minutes, and fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six-

He opened the door and Spirit shot in, ducking beneath Stein's arm. The entire transaction was complete before a normal person could even blink.

"Sorry," Spirit started, looking around the apartment and kneeling down in front of one of the many small tables Marie kept, opening the drawers and pulling out bandages and various other supplies, shoving them into his bag. "We're running low on everything and Marie-"

Stein thinks his gastrointestinal tract must have bottomed out, because he felt like there was a stone in his torso, sinking down down down. Spirit stopped everything he was doing and turned his head, looking at Stein. The cyborg must have had the same blank expression on his face as he usually did when he went to visit Spirit, because the redhead only looked back down at the pile of supplies.

". . .she's really hurt. . ." Spirit finished, his mouth setting into a grim line.

Stein took note of the other man. He was in full police riot-gear, his hair pulled back into a tight ponytail at the nape of his neck with his high collar hiding most of it.

If he looked hard enough, some of his hair looked crispy, dried to a rust instead of a crimson. Beneath his nails, the same color had collected as a half-moon beneath the exposed fingernail, staining the white tips.

Spirit stood up, shutting the drawer and zipping up the bag, jostling the antiseptic without doubt before shouldering the pack, standing in a smooth motion.

The knees of his pants looked darkened.

Stein didn't realize that Spirit was observing him the same way Stein was observing Spirit, and when the cyborg finally looked up at the other man's face, Spirit had something peculiar in his eyes.

"Do you. . .when we fix her up. . .do you want to see her? She's. . .she won't be back for at least a few days. I'm having Naigus forge a doctor's note so she might get out of work to heal."

Stein only looked at him. He thinks he forgot how to breathe for the barest of moments and he knows his stare must have been unnerving.

Spirit chewed on his lip.

Stein didn't say yes.

He didn't say "no", either.

* * *

 **Evidence File #95 for Case 3419**

 _ **Mira Naigus, CCRN**_

 _ **87465, Death City, Nevada**_

 _ **Phone: (702)-[scribbled out]**_

 _ **Date:**_ _January 20th_

 _ **Patient:**_ _Marie Elizabeth Mjolnir_

 _ **Under Care from:**_ _January 19th to January 24th_

 _ **Return to Work On:**_ _January 25th_

 _ **Follow-Up Appointment Scheduled:**_ _January 30th Time: 9:30 [+]AM [ ]PM_

 _ **Reason:**_ _[+]Pain [+]Illness [ ]Injury_

 _ **[+]Other:**_ _Septicemia_

 _ **Practitioner Signature:**_ _[removed]_

* * *

He got the details in snippets over the course of a few days.

He got the details in "dislocated shoulder". He got the details in "lacerations". He got the details in "blood poisoning". He got the details in "potential necrosis".

He feels as though he knows these things, has always known these things. Hadn't known it would happen to Marie, but knows the words. Knows they aren't good. Knows he hates them.

In the same vein, he knows they need to pop her arm back into the socket. He knows stitches need to be administered, perhaps staples, perhaps glue. He doesn't know if she has septicemia or sepsis, but he knows she'll need ceftriaxone, or injectable norepinephine. He knows if the necrosis progresses, the dead flesh will have to be excised.

He doesn't want to know these things.

They must have taken his silence as a no, but he doesn't know what it would have been if he opened his mouth. The thought of it being "I want to see her, now" was a fire he didn't want to touch. The idea of it being the opposite, that he never wanted to see her so mangled was equally as dangerous.

He stays in the place where Marie lived. Lives. With him. Where they occupied the same space. He breezes through all her textbooks, memorizes all her notes, finds that he does not have the desire to eat if it is not at a table where she sits.

He wonders if it's possible to shut down his neural network. None of her books have an answer to that.

Stein wants to stop thinking.

When he looks at the clock, it ticks as though to mock him.

Three days, twenty-two hours, forty-seven minutes, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen seconds.

* * *

 **Evidence File #96 for Case 3419**

 _ **January 26th**_

 _It feels like even breathing hurts. Giriko gave me a hard time over being missing, but no one is connecting it to the Vulture that was almost caught on the 19th. There have been rumors that they were killed. I'm not about to correct anyone._

 _Managed to get a few decent parts and enough scrap for the generators to run for a good few months._

 _Stein's been acting weird around me. Like looking at me hurt him. It isn't like before, though. Before, it was like I reminded him of someone. Now it's. . .something else._

 _He helped me with bandaging. Told me I was doing it wrong. He must have learned more through my textbooks than I did. He's smart. Really smart. It's like he retains everything he reads. He almost acted like a doctor except [scribbled out]_

 _When he touched me, it was the gentlest thing I'd ever felt._

 _No one's ever touched me like that before. [last two sentences are crossed out]_

 _I hope Azusa gets the generators running, soon. Something has to have changed in his coding._

 _None of the emotionless bots have ever acted like him. Not that I've seen._

 _I have a feeling he checked over the antibiotics Mira got me._

* * *

Months later, when the ice from winter had finally melted, he'd asked her.

He'd asked her after they'd watched all those movies together. She didn't think they'd make him want to, she didn't think they'd prompt such a request. But he wanted to know how it felt. She couldn't help but wonder if he'd ever done anything like that, before, being so close to another person. Perhaps before he'd been so hellishly abused, so violently traumatized, he'd been comfortable enough with someone else.

Marie took in a deep breath, gently running her palm over the skin of his torso, again. Whether he'd done so in the past or not, he couldn't remember, and he was putting so much faith in her just by asking that she had to make sure that she wasn't going to disappoint him. She wanted for him to feel safe, to know that he'd put his trust in someone who would never abuse it or him.

Her touch was so loving and gentle, a caress over his skin, and she felt him shiver. Or she thought he did, but his gaze on her remained the same: placid and willing. Curious.

What they were doing was illegal.

Humans and cyborgs weren't allowed to be so close. Hugs were frowned down upon, even, let alone what they were doing. But, despite the fact that he had asked her to, she knew she was risking so much for more than just his experiment.

Perhaps that was selfish of her, too, but she liked touching him. His skin was so warm, his body yielding to her with an ease that almost seemed practiced. She was familiar to him, she realized.

She was the only person he'd been around for longer than a few hours. They stayed in the same house, slept under the same roof, ate at the same table. It was almost like being married, or dating.

But it wasn't. It wasn't at all. It was illegal and she was doing something that not even Azusa or Spirit would be fully comfortable with. It was one thing, making sure a cyborg was safe, treating them with dignity, fighting for their rights.

It was another thing to kiss them.

She. . .she didn't know if what they were doing was for the right reasons. Wasn't it wrong, for her to be the only genuinely interested party? Even if he asked her to, wasn't it her responsibility to deny him?

But she wasn't the only interested party. She was the only invested party, the only one who was nervous, who felt fizzy and giddy and excited, yet so scared. Besides which, he was an adult. He knew what he wanted and she wouldn't treat him as though he was senseless or naïve. He knew what he was getting himself into. He'd been more expressive, recently, having started remembering snippets of things, able to describe different rooms, voices, blurry faces. Maybe it would jog his memory, of someone, something in the past he was trying to find out.

It was just an experiment, she assured herself: it meant nothing to him. He wasn't invested in it or in her, and it was only because he had a head for science, seemed strangely attached to it, that they were doing so in the first place. Even with the blinds down and the lights low, she felt so fretfully exposed, but he seemed relaxed. She was tightly wired, but she forced her shoulders down, squirming in his lap.

She had no indication that her touch was exciting him in any way, and it dealt a soft blow to her pride, but she took in a deep breath and leaned close.

Did it even count as intimacy if she was the only one who had any sexual attraction in the scenario? Being so close to him made her skin feel electric, like she was tuned too high.

When she leaned in, she sucked down some of his breath as they shared the air, and he tilted his head, meeting her in the middle like he'd seen in the movies.

The kiss was strangely dry, entirely closed. His lips were chapped, and there wasn't any real fire behind it. But she made sure she was gentle, careful to keep close to his boundaries. If she could, she'd ask him for every step, but she'd have to rely on non-verbal cues. It was almost uncomfortable, but she stroked over his shoulders and he yielded to her, muttering "Marie" so lowly, she felt her belly heat up. She pressed closer to him, wrapping an arm around his neck and he matched her movements, giving her the go ahead to open her mouth, just barely, and he did the same, allowing her to take his upper lip into her mouth.

He was just going through the motions. She shifted, grinding down slightly and tilting her head to deepen the kiss, her free hand coming to cup his cheek as the one settled on his neck began to play with his hair, her body leaning onto his. There was some residue of electricity in it, humming up her spine, but it was mostly nerves.

She didn't ease up, sucking lightly on his cupid's bow, and when his tongue came and brushed over her mouth, she made a soft, pleased noise that sounded strangely like his name. Something seemed to shift with them, then, and he breathed in harshly through his nose, one of his arms coming around her slim waist and pressing her close to his body as though possessively. She gasped when he called "Marie", and she was still grinding down on his lap as he arched to her and it felt so natural, like it was what they were meant to do, that she felt all her carefully concentrated focus fall away in favor for the instinctual, moaning low in contentment against his lips. When he licked at her mouth once more, brushing his tongue over her lower lip, sucking slightly before biting down, she groaned and grasped his hair between her fingers.

She didn't mean to tug. She didn't mean to pull, sharply, or otherwise, but his eyes popped open at the action, and he shoved her away so hard, so suddenly, she fell right off his lap, right from the bed and onto the floor. Marie cried out, in surprise rather than pain, before she struggled upright, staring at Stein who'd thrown his hands over his face, seemingly hyperventilating.

She gasped, aching for him, hands outstretched. "Frank-"

" ** _Don't touch me_** ," he said, so venomously she thinks the air left her lungs, shrinking and shriveling.

"Franken-"

"Shut up! Shut up, shut up!" he demanded, shaking his head, hysterical.

She didn't know what went wrong. It had been so. . .perfect. For a single moment, she felt ignited, like she was alive in his arms, like the entire world didn't matter. It had shifted, gotten hot and passionate so fast with them, their chemistry undeniable.

It was the hair pulling that must have triggered him, and she ached so deeply for whatever he had seen behind his eyelids that she had prompted. Marie wanted to grasp at his upper arms, but she knew it would only make it worse.

She comes to her knees, instead, crawling over. Her chest is still heaving as she tries to collect her breath, tries to get the heat she felt for him to simmer and she knows she can do nothing but be there for him. She watches how he rocked, harsh breathing and a breaking voice, and she feels something inside of her harden until it is brittle and sorry.

It reminds her of someone else. It reminds her of Crona when they first found them, how shuddering and terrified they were at even the touch of a palm on a shoulder. It reminds her of what pain must feel like.

"I'm here," she told him softly. "I'm here, I'll always be here, I'm sorry," she whispered, soothing, gentle. At first, she doesn't think it does anything at all, but after a while, minutes, a half hour, he seems to calm at her words. Marie hesitated before she steeled herself, unknowing if it was the right thing to do, but hoping it was.

"Can I-. . .can I hold your hand?" she asks, again, echoing the first time, echoing when she asked Crona all those years ago, and he seems so drained he only gives a single jerk of his head, as if to tell her that he doesn't care. But it isn't a jerk in the negative.

One would think she was diffusing a bomb with how delicate her touch was when she moved his hands off of his face. Yet, despite that, the instant he spotted her, for a single moment, his world froze and burned at the same time. Marie's amber eye went dull, cold, sharpening until it looked feline. Snake-like. Her golden hair, the shade of a wedding band, darkened until it was tawny, the curls haphazard. A braid flashed in his mind, a smirk, a scowl.

But then it was gone, and he was left looking into Marie's eye, something in his chest stuttering. She holds his hands in her own, thumb gliding over the knuckles so soothingly. And he stares at her, stares and tries to wipe away the anguish and the ruinous feeling inside of his ribcage.

He stares at her, and it is unnerving, but she meets it. Looking at him made her feel pressurized and compressed and like her spine would simply break and never come back together, the vertebrae scattered on the floor. Or inside of her like puzzle-pieces.

She cannot close her eye, so she only squeezes his hand.

"I'm sorry. . ." she says, again, so watery. Everything inside of her feels jumbled. She doesn't know what to do with the comparison she's found.

She thinks there is nothing to do. How deeply hurt he is, she cannot heal him, no matter how much she'd want to. No matter how badly, how desperately she wants to shutter his pain away in her ribcage so he would never have to feel it so agonizingly deep again.

He says nothing; he simply stares. The silence stretches around them like taffy, elastic and oppressive. The sort that, upon opening your mouth, dips down your throat and steals your thoughts. It takes her two times opening her mouth until she can actually speak, again. His green eyes had locked on her one amber, and she finds that he leaves her wordless.

Worldless.

Whirling.

"I don't know how to help," she finally said, frustrated and sad, tempted to throw her arms about and chuck something out the window and give herself the space for theatrics, but she was not that woman. She was the woman who wept openly in her bathroom after turning on the shower, the woman who could carry men home from the gutter, the woman who went through the radioactive trash so she could get a part for a cyborg who wouldn't know how to thank her, or why, or even if they should.

He didn't flinch in front of her. He did not rush to lower his large hands, warm and calloused and so able to cradle and caress, to cup her cheek. He did not bow his head so he could look more deeply into her in her singular, star-colored eye as he leaned in. He did not answer her.

This was not romance.

It couldn't be romance. Romance was not what he needed and though that wasn't an outcome that made her happy, an outcome that she wanted, she knew he needed her to be there for him. And why would she want it, anyway? He was nothing she was looking for in a man. In a partner. In a husband she had constructed in her head like a perfect fantasy.

Yet there she was. Pining. Again. Feeling ruined.

She knew why.

His breathing evened out until it was back to her normal, and every expression on his face fizzled, dying. He was shutting himself down until he closed to her, almost immediately.

Marie didn't know what to do in the light of that. She didn't have it in her to simply accept it, to realize that she'd fallen in love, again, with a man who could never, would never ask to hold her hand because it would make her happy. Joe she could blame. Joe she could call a coward: "I can't trust you" her ass. Who else if not her? But Stein?

How could she blame a man who couldn't possibly know? He owed her nothing. She wasn't dating him, and he only agreed to be kissed for science, not for love. She did everything she did out of her own volition.

And he was a man who had his heart ripped from his chest, wires looping, a man who had it beat in front of him until nails dug into the sides and tore him to tatters. She should have known better, she should have told him "no", she shouldn't have jumped at the opportunity to feel what his lips were like, what his kiss was like.

Even if it left her sparking and giddy, even if she felt like she never wanted to stop kissing him in that moment when he'd pulled her to him, calling her name as though she were the only thing in his entire world, the only thing that mattered. For a man who had been so uninterested, he sure got passionate so quickly.

That was the thing with him. It was either all the emotions at once, or none at all.

She couldn't blame him. She couldn't and that drained her of every degree of heat.

How stupid of her, to think that something like a kiss would end positively. It wasn't one of the movies she played back when she was a girl, where the hero comes along and swoops in and they have a happily ever after once a kiss is delivered, all wrapped in a bow. Who did she think she was?

How could she ever allow herself to think that in a world of scrap metal and destitution, a world where she breathed in paint chips and lost her eye to the necrosis of her undercover profession, a world where she had to watch person after person come in to a lab, treated worse than animals: how could a world like that ever consist of happy endings?

She could still breathe. She could still think and find it in her to be sad but she couldn't hold onto it all or she would shatter onto her carpet and no one would be there to scoop those pieces as though she were a sculpture that would be missed. She had to buck up.

She still had a job. A job that went beyond him and beyond her and beyond whatever girlhood dream she had for a frothy white dress and an aisle and a ring that gleamed the color of her irises.

"I want to help you," she told him. And there was nothing else to say. He was trying to help himself. He was fixing his own coding. She wasn't naïve or silly enough to believe that she didn't have a hand, perhaps even two, she though wryly, in that fact, but he was trying.

"I want to help you," she repeated.

And finally, finally, he looks down at her, and nudges his leg. He'd had enough of touch, and it dislodges her enough.

"I hadn't asked for your help," he says, cold, robotic.

The brittle pieces inside of her collapse, crack, and she wonders, if she listened hard enough, if she'd hear the splintering.

She can't take that from him. That she cannot do. Disgust, fury, annoyance, passion: all those things she could take from him. From anyone. From Crona and Tsubaki, from all the cyborgs she'd helped in the past. All of them.

But not indifference. She refused indifference. She dealt with indifference every day at work, when Giriko laughed as he cut the emotionless cyborgs who had pain receptors but no sorrow, no pity, no sense of fear. She dealt with indifference every day when Arachne stepped in, looking at the broken people she'd sent into the lab and only sighed, shaking her head and batting around that ridiculous, lacy handfan, and simply asked if there was any progress. She dealt with indifference when she had to sit at her computer, and say "No, ma'am" and had to forget the face of the woman who was in prior, the woman who they fried the circuits of because Giriko thought if she got close enough to death, she'd experience some sort of emotion. They wanted to utilize fear, the bastards.

Indifference she wanted to chew up and spit out. He was above that. She thought he was beyond that. And she refused to let him sell himself short. She wouldn't let him sit by and succumb to cowardice, unable to face his demons. When she stood, she towered over his sitting form.

She had hellfire in her eye.

* * *

 **Evidence File #105 for Case 3419**

 _ **[date has been scribbled out]**_

 _None of the safehouses have opened up. Azusa is trying to horde all the energy in the generators for as long as she can. I think she thinks Stein is a lost cause._

 _Spirit doesn't. I can kind of tell. They seem to have some kind of friendship going on. Every time I've brought Stein for general maintenance, he seems comfortable enough around him._

 _I just want to see him happy._

 _I don't know if he can be._

 _I don't know if I can be any help in that. [last sentence is scribbled out]_

 _But he's trying. I think he is. He is. He's trying so hard. Why can't anyone else see how hard he tries?_

* * *

He found that if he just kept his head down enough, people generally avoided him. Especially as he made his way to the somewhat shadier part of town where Spirit Albarn's house was. Of course, the hood he had over his bolt helped, as did the fact that the exposed seam on his face had long since meshed together and healed.

When he left Marie's apartment, he didn't really know what he was doing. Marie had taken great pains to make sure he was safe, but after their. . .

Their what? Their moment? Their spat? When they swapped spit and he shoved her off of him and then shut down? What was he supposed to call that?

Whatever it was, her reaction had been near horrifying, the fury in her eye, the disappointment on her face, and after she whirled out of the apartment, all but stomping, he had found that he just wanted to get out of the house where everything he touched or looked at reminded him of her.

He didn't have many places to go, if any, but he'd been to Spirit's house multiple times in the past, and the man was friendly enough. Besides which, he was close enough, too, which meant that Stein could slide out of the house without being detected.

He knew the danger he was stepping into. Which was why he felt something like a weight lifting off of his shoulders when he knocked on the man's door, not knowing if he should use the fingerprint identification, or if Spirit was even home, and the redhead had opened with his eyebrows scrunched, something confused on his face as he stepped to the side, accepting him in.

The question of "Where's Marie," wasn't exactly pleasant though, but Spirit got the hint pretty quickly, raising his red brows and blinking at Stein before he shook his head and ushered him to the sofa.

Stein didn't really know the etiquette for such a scenario. He doubted he'd ever have to be in one like that ever before.

It didn't take long for Spirit to come back from where he had disappeared to, holding a cup and setting it in front of Stein without even asking.

"So," he started, as though opening the conversation after a few moment of silence.

Stein grunted.

They stared at each other, the cyborg not making any motion to even grasp at his cup. Spirit blinked at him, shifting from foot to foot.

"Any reason you're in my house at-" Spirit cut himself off to look over at the clock on his mantle, "6 pm?"

Stein looked away, closing his eyes, sighing through his nose.

"Without Marie, might I add," Spirit tacked on. Stein's eyes snapped open at that, and he looked over at the other man with his unnerving, unwavering stare, though it didn't seem to disturb the policeman.

"You're just lucky Maka's out at Liz's house," Spirit commented, taking a deep slug of his coffee, making a face. He turned around to go back to what Stein assumed was his kitchen to rummage for something involving his drink.

Stein noted how the man was swaying, slightly. No doubt sleep deprived. Spirit's voice called, loud and clear from the room he had walked into. "Do you want any sugar?"

Stein didn't answer, only waiting until Spirit stepped back into the room and plopped down on his table, something akin to amusement on his face. "I guess that's a 'no'".

Damn, he was chatty. Marie at least knew how to give him some space. He wanted to escape, not to walk into what must have been a radio talkshow. Spirit took another sip of his drink, seemingly content with it this time, before he looked at Stein from over his mug.

"Okay, what did you do?" he asked, and Stein was almost taken aback from the man's flippancy.

"Hm?" Stein asked, not allowing any irritation to seep into his face.

"Oh, c'mon. I'm me. You wouldn't be here if Marie was home, and since there aren't any meetings scheduled, that means you must have done something to make her leave the apartment. And if you're here, that means both of you must want to be out of the apartment. You aren't stupid enough to forget how dangerous it is to be outside. So you took the risk to come here."

Stein only blinked, somewhat impressed by how fast the man had pieced things together. "And?" he prompted, not showing any signs of letting up. Spirit rolled his eyes before he made a bemused face at him.

"And," he began, "you must have really fucked up if Marie of all people is mad at you."

Stein didn't flinch, though something must have come onto his face that made Spirit quirk his eyebrow up.

"Look, I don't mean to pry but. . .it's Marie, y'know? Hell, the woman could probably look her murderer in the face and tell 'em she forgave 'em."

Stein sighed, though he knew he had no need to. The exasperation was foreign, but present, regardless. Another stem off from fury, he supposed. He didn't understand emotions, honestly. How could he know how to pick one from the other?

There was a different feeling, too. One he couldn't place, for how could he identify a face he had never seen, save in glimpses his previous owner dangled in front of him, played in snippets while he danced to how she coded him? He shivered.

Revulsion he understood. That one was common.

Spirit's gaze on the other man's face didn't let up, and he seemed to be observing every twitch and movement the man made, taking note of the shiver.

That was new. Marie had insisted that he was showing some sort of emotion, but Spirit had genuinely never seen any sign of that in any of their meetings. They just had to go off of what Marie had said.

It seemed that she was something of a sore spot for the cyborg. Spirit couldn't really blame him for that, either. Marie had a habit of worming her way into someone's heart and making it so that they had no choice but to adore her. She just had the kind of personality that prompted warmth and compassion.

"You know, there's a reason Baba Yaga put her on the Empathy Project," Spirit started, looking to see if there was anything Stein would do in response, but the man only closed his eyes and leaned back, cutting off any direct emotion that could have been reflected in his irises.

"Hm?" Stein replied, not necessarily curious, but more interested in filling up the space. Spirit took another sip of his drink, stretching the moment out as far as he possibly could, waiting until Stein's eyebrow twitched, almost imperceptibly.

"They wanted her to suffer," Spirit informed, easily, taking another drink and all but smiling at the fact that Stein's eyes opened, with something Spirit would call surprise in the action. "She was twenty-two when she got her Master's. Arachne vetted her, looked at her file. She used to volunteer at trauma centers, you know? Marie, not Arachne. They knew she had a soft heart. It kills her to be around the emotionless. . .she wouldn't be working so hard if it didn't."

Stein stared at him. He wasn't certain what Spirit was attempting, though he could tell the redhead might have been needling him. It was clear from what interactions he'd observed between the two that Spirit had a certain love for Marie: familial, almost. As though she could be Maka's aunt, though not by blood.

"So?" Stein responded, blinking. There was that feeling again, too. That buzzing in what most referred to as a stomach but Stein knew to be his intestines. A "gut", he supposed. Spirit's face dropped.

"So, if she can still work in Baba Yaga Enterprises despite that but had to leave her apartment, you had to have done something terrible to drive her to that."

Stein shrugged. But something gnawed at him, threatening to open its' maw and swallow him, like an angler fish, consuming him from the middle outward. He almost shifted around in his seat, though he felt too drained to do so, and he only continued to stare at Spirit, watching as the man took a breath in through his nose.

Spirit had interrogated before. Hell, it was his job. But he'd never had to question an emotionless, or rather, partially emotionless cyborg. It wasn't much, Stein's reactions, but it was enough. It was obvious that Marie had to be right, that Stein's coding had to have been coming back, snapping into him like an elastic band over skin.

And, if Spirit's observations were anything to go by, Stein didn't look too pleased about the developments. That was to be expected. From what little he knew of developmental psychology, the less pleasant emotions usually came first. Irritation, confusion, surprise: he had seen all those things in Stein's face.

Guilt.

How could he not notice the guilt? That was emotion Spirit had ample experience in. He had it all too much experience with it when he came home to Kami, lying about having had been at work.

Sex was work, if you really thought about it. No matter who it was with.

Marriage was work, too. If Baba Yaga hadn't gotten to Kami, he was sure their marriage would dissolve, anyway. He clearly didn't have the skills for married life, but he did possess the feelings.

Stein took a look at the cup in front of him, the one Spirit placed down when he first came in. He hadn't made a single move to reach for it, or look at it, before. The silence stretched out in the room, Spirit's gaze settling at the wall to the side.

It almost felt like they were sharing something, a moment of some kind, though Stein wasn't really privy to what it was. Instead, he only focused on the cup, not yet determining what it was until something in his mind connected and he realized it must have been coffee.

In the past, he thinks he might have liked coffee. It was strange to think of that, remember the phantoms of joy chilling across his skin, and he took a deep breath in, focusing intently on the beverage.

Spirit took note of the intense focus Stein had, but he knew, whether sympathetically, or empathetically, or simply from some strange connection he had with the cyborg, one born from disappointing women who were amazing in too many ways, that he shouldn't pick up the cup or move it. The cyborg was contemplating, and Spirit didn't know what he was thinking of, but he knew it must have been important.

The shivers of past-pleasure passed through his body, and Stein continued staring at the cup, finally settling into the less intense skin he was used to, the emotional skin of dulled and blunted feeling.

Yet, when he peered into the overly crème lightened caffeine, he could almost envision her eye.

He didn't want to acknowledge why he felt so damn bad.

* * *

 **Evidence File #110 for Case 3419**

 _ **March 7th**_

 _Stein doesn't seem comfortable with being hooked up to machines. Other than general maintenance, he doesn't seem comfortable with much of anything._

 _I wish I knew what happened to him._

 _The Empathy Project is completely falling through, but I don't think that means emotions are unable to manifest in a cyborg. Stein is proof of that._

 _I've been trying to collect enough evidence to convince Azusa, but at this point, I don't know how to go about it._

 _Numbers are so impersonal when it comes to emotions. Science just can't cut it._

 _How do you describe love through a chemical reaction? Through a sequence of coding?_

 _You can't._

 _I don't think you can._

 _I don't think I want to._

* * *

When he finally came back to Marie's apartment, the white jacket's hood covering most of his face, he fished the key she made him out of the pocket and used it to open the door, fast, so he could rush inside. Spirit was a ridiculous man, he decided. He was too many emotions in a sleep-deprived, overprotective man. When he went over, initially, intending to get some time to himself in a safe space, he didn't expect that he'd end up babysitting the elder.

Stein rolled his eyes. Annoyance he was also familiar with. He could probably pick that one out of an ocean of other unfamiliarity.

He made his way past the six flights of stairs, barely winded due to the more mechanical bits of him, and he only got eight strange looks from Marie's apartment-mates while he snuck in as though he were some sort of criminal.

And, of course he would. Marie had been so careful that he wouldn't be seen. But he thought he could pass as a regular human being with his hair covered. His face was trustworthy enough.

When he finally got to her floor, it was deserted, something he was thankful for, especially due to the fact that he had to crouch down and fish her spare key out from under her door-mat.

It was something so primitive, frankly: the fact that she still had a door-mat, let alone that she kept a key beneath it. Regardless, he wouldn't be able to get inside, so he wasn't going to question her. She hadn't really struck him as the type to make poor decisions in all the time he'd lived with her.

Lived with her. Like he lived with someone else, in the past.

It was so frustrating, to know things in snippets, in phantoms, in a hazy memory that was too fuzzy to really make out. For a brief moment, as he stepped in and closed the door behind him, he wondered why he was trying so hard to get something that, thus far, was entirely unsatisfactory. He unzipped his jacket to set on the multiple hooks Marie had right near her door, and he took note of the dark black jacket he knew she'd wear if she was to go on a run to a landfill.

Where she found him. Where she risked her life so that he could find his way out.

Something in his chest stuttered and he swallowed hard.

Emotions seemed. . .messy. They were disgusting, and overpowering. They, as evidence from Spirit when he tried to get Stein to open up more, unsuccessfully, could lead a grown man to sniffle with snot running down their upper lip while they lamented their wife.

Why would Stein ever want that? Why did he want that?

He didn't know. He didn't think he did. Yet something in him was calling for them, like an ache, a craving, a yearning.

He wanted to understand.

Those feelings were severed from him, cut from his very being, and he wanted them back regardless of how complicated they would be. But it was like learning something after having unlearned it, like wading through a sea of caramel, sticky, and unpleasant, and slowslowslow.

It was like learning the guitar after years of not playing it.

He paused at that thought, eyebrows coming together and looking down at his palm.

There it was, again. That blip of an idea that felt so familiar yet so not. He'd been having them more and more recently, the more time he spent around others. But that didn't make sense from what he had read from Marie's books. Cyborgs weren't supposed to have thoughts like that.

He was feeling less and less connected to the descriptions in Marie's textbooks, now that he thought about it.

Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he felt lost in himself. Behind his lids was the darkness of a million starless nights. No coding, no wires, just a void of. . .something.

He didn't want to be left alone to that. Recently, there was always someone or something around to bring him from that. It was why he refused to shut down for a night, to fake the sleep that a real human being would need. To be in that abyss was. . .horrifying.

He didn't understand what horror truly was, but he knew he felt it. And that was more than confusing. What was something that could not be explained? What was fear? What was sorrow? What was that yawning ache in him that was barely ever smothered out?

He wanted to know. Maybe that was why he was doing what he was doing, though the closer he pressed his hands to the flame of what he felt, the more it seemed he should pull away. Put on gloves, at least. Find something for safety. He flinched from the fear that what he would discover would disappoint him.

But discovery. He thirsted for it. His curiosity was deeper than he could ever dig alone.

And speaking of discoveries, Marie wasn't in the living room. Upon glancing at the cheerful, yellow clock she kept hanging in the kitchen (somehow, not her own, anymore), he realized that it was the time slot to watch what must have been her favorite show.

She must really have been upset. He knew she'd cried because of him, before. She wasn't covert even when she tried. It didn't bring him any joy to make her cry, but up until then, he hadn't really felt much of anything in regards to her negative emotions.

But the last time she was so upset had been over a month ago. She had seemed so much more open and happy. He didn't understand those things, either, but he could observe them. Sometimes, she looked like the women in the films she enjoyed so much.

Not now, though. There was no warm blonde on the couch, so different from the one he had at first thought of. The one who was both fading from his bones yet sharpening in his memories. As though becoming impotent, an image without power.

He didn't care. He knew he didn't.

He thought he didn't.

When he went over to the loveseat, and really, what a tacky thing to call it, that was usually occupied by two during that particular time-slot, he couldn't help but feel an all-too-familiar emptiness.

Something was missing from him.

He didn't want to close his eyes.

* * *

 **Evidence File #113 for Case 3419**

 _ **[no date was written]**_

 _I don't think I need to check his coding to know he's changed. There's not an emotionless cyborg in existence like him._

 _There's not a regular cyborg in existence like him._

 _No serial number, no batch number, no model number._

 _Where did he come from? What happened to him? What was his original name? Who had hurt him?_

 _I wish there was a way to help him._

 _I feel so useless._

* * *

When Marie got back to her apartment, she felt heavy. Azusa had been disgustingly logical, as per usual, but what else had she expected? The younger woman offered solutions, she wasn't one for sitting around and talking about feelings. Not now-a-days, anyway, with things having been just so flat out confusing. Everyone needed answers and Azusa could provide them without hesitation.

Or she could try. She wasn't the kind for comfort or girl talk, and neither was Naigus. Both of them cared about her, she knew that, but they weren't Kami.

Lord, how she missed Kami. It was times like then, when she most needed a sympathetic shoulder, that she felt the gape the woman had left when she was taken away. Kami just had a way with people, pulling them close to her and refusing to let them feel abandoned.

Maka seemed to have adopted that, as well. She just wouldn't leave her friends alone until they were okay, again, and it had inspired the girl to a massive group of rag-tag friends, the kinds of which Marie hadn't ever seen since, well, since her own. Marie's mouth pinched, her eye stinging as she closed her door behind her, pulling her jacket off before her eye immediately noticed the white jacket on the hook.

Her eyebrows met in confusion. That wasn't where it had been, before.

Still, it meant he was home, at least.

She hoped it did. She closed her eye.

She felt bad. She couldn't ignore that. She felt shitty. He'd had a goddamn panic attack and she practically pounced on him: what had she been thinking? She wanted to cringe. He was right when he'd accused her of being selfish. No one who was a good person would have done something like that.

She couldn't tell Azusa the entire story, how could she have?, but she did mention he had something akin to a breakdown.

Azusa didn't really believe her, wanting some kind of proof, but Marie was over having to prove that he could have emotions. She knew he did. She couldn't make up a damn panic attack.

She had to apologize. It was all her fault. She never should have kissed him. She never should have touched him with or without his permission.

But what was she supposed to do? Treat him like a leper? Act as though he was diseased? She didn't know how to be around people so different, so fragile yet brittle, strong with so many fault lines.

She sheepishly stepped into her living room, and there he was, on her couch, the spot that was designated as his since that first night she had brought the blue pillows in.

The space next to him was empty as though waiting for her.

It was like he had been waiting for her.

When he looked up, there was something she couldn't place on his face, but it was gone immediately, wiped clean. It almost looked like. . .relief.

That couldn't be right.

Could it?

Marie walked forward, hesitating only briefly before she came to stand in front of him. "Stein, I," she cut herself off, her voice sounding scratchy, but he only looked at her as though willing her to continue. ". . .can I. . .sit here?" she asked, a familiar ritual. However, unlike usual, when he'd only nod, once, or decline non-verbally, his olive eyes were trained on her.

"If you'd like," he said, and her eyebrows went up at that.

It was almost like he was opening conversation between them, coaxing her.

When she sat down next to him, she was careful not to touch him in anyway. If he didn't invite it, she would take every pain to avoid their arms brushing, knees knocking, skin warm on skin. She didn't have that right. Marie stared forward, thinking of what to say. He wasn't easy to read. No one really was, but he was even less so.

She didn't know if another apology would only make him mad at her. She wasn't good at words, and she felt that most now. She opened her mouth, intent on filling up the quiet, but he beat her to it.

"Marie," he said, and she turned to look at him, her lower lip dropped slightly, to take in what expression he had.

His face was smooth and impassive, but something. . .something she couldn't place was glinting in his eyes. She was so focused on his visage, she didn't even notice the movement his arm made until he flicked his eyes downward and she followed the motion.

His hand had flipped over, palm up, and he had placed it between them, letting it rest on the cushions. Her mouth felt dry all of a sudden, and she tried to find a word, multiple words, to say, to ask. It felt so foreign.

Her stomach was fizzing, bubbly.

". . .um. . ." she started, eloquently, and if she looked up, she'd see the barest ghost of amusement flit across his face.

He didn't do or say anything, letting her come to her own conclusions. It could mean nothing.

Or, it couldn't.

She didn't know what to make of it for a moment, but she glanced up at him, watching him watch her, curiosity evident in his features, before realization smashed into her and her lower lip dropped, slightly. There was a question on her face, and her lungs felt like they had filled up, all of her just air and laughter, feeling almost. . .giddy.

She gulped, understanding what he was trying to prompt. ". . .can I. . .hold your hand?" Marie asked, scared of feeling foolish for a single, gaping moment, before he reacted to her question and she spotted the same bare-bones nod she was used to.

She almost felt like a schoolgirl, again.

When she set her palm into his, fingers interlacing, he didn't even twitch. There was no negative reaction from him.

She squeezed.

And she thinks his grasp tightened.

* * *

 **Evidence File #117 for Case 3419**

 _We have to check all Missing Persons Databases in the past twelve years_

 _[tear marks are evident all over the page] [smudged ink] [barely legible]_

* * *

She doesn't know how long they stayed like that, simply being next to one another. She doesn't really care. He is warm and solid and nothing like he was when she first met him.

Marie doesn't know who opens their mouth first. All she knows is the "I really am sorry" is tumbling out of her like a gush she can't control, and this time, instead of a shrug or a grunt, he actually turns to look at her.

"You didn't know."

She blinks up at him, her singular eye focused on his face, looking for insincerity. Finding none.

She chews the inside of her cheek. ". . .did you?"

The air felt thick. His fingers seemed to tighten around her own, as though for comfort, before he shakes his head and his gray locks fall into his eyes.

"No."

She looks away. The room is silent for a moment, for a long moment, before he sucks in a breath.

"You reminded me of her."

And at that, she whips her gaze right back to his face, her eye widening.

"Her?"

But he isn't looking at her. He is looking over her head, and his eyes look far away, as though gazing into nothing.

She wants to know what he sees behind his eyelids, because he doesn't seem to want to blink. The very act of saying "her" seemed to hurt him.

This time, it is her fingers that tighten around his, and her thumb is stroking the back of his hand.

"But you're nothing like her," he muses, still not looking at her.

"Like who?"

He says nothing, chewing his lip.

"Stein?"

"Your hair isn't even similar. I thought it was, when I first saw you. She was blonde, too."

"Stein, who was blonde?" Marie urges, something pressurized and heavy in her chest. She feels like her skin isn't her own, all of a sudden, like she wants to squirm out of it.

Because she knows. She doesn't want to know. She hates the thought of knowing. She hates the comparison. She hated it the first time Crona made it. She hated it when Crona had flinched from her when she tried to touch them.

She hates in now, when she knows what will come out of his mouth. She hates it when he looks at her and she wants to cup his face in her hands and tell him she wishes with everything inside of her he didn't have to endure what he did. She hates it.

She hates that it took her that long to finally understand, to connect the dots. Stein and Crona. Crona and Stein. The way they reacted: their fear, their panic, their resilience, their strength, their fragility.

When Stein speaks, it's almost like it comes from a haze, like he is recalling a name in a dream.

In a nightmare.

Like Crona did.

She doesn't want to hear it. She doesn't want to know it. She doesn't want to choke on her breath and feel her insides splinter.

"Medusa."

Marie feels her world shatter.

* * *

 **Evidence File #120 for Case 3419**

 _I hate her. I hate her. I hate her._


	5. That is Why I Want A Coin Operated Boy

Marie was wringing her hands in the time it was taking for Azusa to run the search, the other woman's fingers flickering across the keyboard with a speed that anyone would be envious of. It was obvious to everyone that the woman had been a court stenographer before she got involved in the business of emancipating cyborgs.

Everyone seemed to hold their breath, the entire room felt like it was made out of gasoline and matchsticks, everyone watching the screen as face after face went by, rejected immediately if it didn't fit before the next one passed over.

Marie had sounded the general alarm to everyone in the group as soon as she could. With what happened to Crona, she couldn't take a risk. The lack of serial numbers, no model, no batch number.

She didn't want to believe that what happened to Crona had happened to anyone else in the world, but she would put no cruelty past Medusa. She knew how to ruin anything without any remorse.

The world stopped when the screen did, Marie's eye zeroing in on the face of a young man on a digital Death Certificate. And it was like entire Earth simply didn't spin for a few moments, but the ground beneath her feet felt like it was wobbling.

No wonder they couldn't find him through the cyborg databases. He would never have been there. He wasn't originally a cyborg. Just like Crona hadn't originally been a cyborg.

Marie swallowed down what felt like her heart in her esophagus.

He was so young.

In the certificate, he looked like she did when she was still in University. He couldn't have been any older than twenty in the picture they had unearthed.

His eyes were still the same, Marie realized. She had looked into that same golden-gray-green many times, too many times. It must have been painstaking for someone to have to replace them with glass. The color was uncanny.

They'd have to be handmade, she realized. No one would ever sell that color on a market. It was too unique. He was a unique looking man, overall. And he had glasses on, in that picture. After a moment, Azusa pressed a button and a news article popped up, and with a pang, Marie saw that they had used his university ID picture as identification. He wasn't smiling in the photo, but there was something amused on his face. His hair was combed, his eyebrow raised. He was in a crisp, button-up shirt with three buttons undone at his throat, where she could barely make out the Star of David he wore.

He was gorgeous. His hair was the palest white-blonde she had ever seen in her life, his eyebrows and eyelashes matching. Instead of where the seam was on him, now, there was a small scar through his eyebrow. Perhaps from some childhood brawl.

Childhood.

He had a childhood. He wasn't born fated to be a cyborg. He wasn't outfitted with a metallic skeleton at birth. He had been an entirely organic being.

And, now, he was in her home, one she didn't know if she could still call entirely hers, trying to piece himself back together.

"Frank Stein," Azusa read off, her voice flat and sad, "supposedly killed in a car accident eight years ago on his way to an interview for a surgeon position at a local hospital."

"Stein," Marie said, and she hadn't realized she was crying until she stepped forward, her voice coming out watery. Spirit had to look away when he saw his close friend's face, Marie's expression looking broken open, something so deeply sorrowful seeped into every line of her body.

"He was human before?" Naigus whispered, horror in each vowel.

Marie sobbed, the sound reverberating in every corner of the room, and Azusa lowered her head as though in mourning.

"I can't believe-" Marie started, breaking herself off with a harsh gasp inward.

Human experimentation had been illegal for years. Ever since she was a little girl. Crona had been the closest she had gotten to something so horrific, the child having revealed to be exempt from becoming a cyborg, yet forced to become one from their disgusting Mother's urgings. But Crona was spared growing up human, spared having to experience the agonizing switch. They had been changed at barely five years old, but Stein?

Stein. . .

Marie felt a warm hand on her back as she curled inward, feeling like she was choking on her heart.

She didn't know whose hand it was.

She just knew it wasn't the one she wanted.

* * *

It was a frenzy, after that. The knowledge had been like a sucker-punch and no one knew what they were meant to do now that they had it in their grasp.

"Damnit, we should have known," Spirit said, wanting to hit anything nearby that didn't feel pain. Azusa shook her head.

"How should we have? After Crona-"

"All the signs were like Crona-"

"No, they weren't. Crona was emotive, responsive-"

"And then so was Stein-"

"We just found out about that-"

"Well, what do we do, now? We couldn't find her last time-"

"We can't do anything, honestly-"

The room seemed ablaze, everyone talking over one another until Marie's voice broke in, frozen as an arctic. "So, what? We can't do anything so we're just gonna shove him away in some underground safehouse where he can only get visitors once in a while?"

The room yawned in its silence, and Marie's singular eye seemed to glare at everyone, still stinging from her tears before. Azusa shifted in her seat as Naigus looked away.

"Marie-" Sid began, one of the few brave enough to face the infamous Pulverizer's wrath.

"What, Sid? Are you going to tell me Crona is doing okay?"

No one could say that. Not with a straight face, not if they told the truth.

"Maka went and visited them last week," Spirit said, quietly, and Marie whirled around. "She said they were happy that she came-"

"So that means they're okay? Job well done, wash our hands of it?" Marie asked, and Spirit lifted his hands up as though to placate her, though it did nearly nothing to calm the blood boiling in Marie's veins. She locked gazes with everyone, one right after the other, but no one wanted to look at her intense stare for longer than a few moments. Her lips pinched at the edges, the breath in her body feeling combustible.

"It isn't fair!" Marie cried out, eye squinting. "Crona spent their entire life being abused by that monster and we can't do a damn thing about it! And now Stein. . .eight years he. . ." she cut herself, fists curling, looking every bit her namesake of the Pulverizer that she earned after breaking multiple doors down with just her bare hands. "Aren't they why we started doing this in the first place? What good are we if all our answers are that we can't do anything?"

There was that damn silence again. She took in a deep breath, refusing to cry. She cried enough about Crona, Crona who didn't get the chance for revenge. Crona who stayed in what everyone nicknamed Death City, living in a random safehouse, just so Maka could still visit them.

Crona whose heart was too big for what they got. Crona who reminded her why she fought so damn hard for that bill to be passed, for B.Y.E to collapse down to rubble and dust.

Marie despised Medusa and she never even met her.

Spirit shifted his gaze to the floor, eyes downcast. It was still a personal failure for him to have let her get away with it. He had all the evidence, was compiling it, secretly, so he could present it to his boss in one fell swoop and find Medusa to be prosecuted for experimenting on human beings. And then it was gone. One day. And his boss, who everyone only referred to as "Death", told him not to get tangled in things too big for him.

He was getting so close to a location. And then it was ripped from him. Crona absolutely refused to give it away.

Stein could be their only chance to get somewhere. He felt bad, for a moment, at the thought of using Stein to get to some conclusion, but it was more for everyone's benefit. There was no malice. And if they both suffered at the hands of the same person, getting the two of them in a room could prove the most fruitful, as well as the most comforting, for them to have someone who could actually understand. He lifted his eyeline back up, meeting Marie's dead on.

"I think he should meet with them."

The room was so silent they could hear a pin drop, they could hear their heartbeats in their ears. Marie stared at him for a moment, before she blinked, slowly nodding.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I think he should."

* * *

 **Evidence File #125 for Case 3419**

 _ **March 9th**_

 _Naigus looked over Stein's [scribbled out] Frank's [scribbled out] Stein's skeletal structure again through a few scans. Azusa didn't even grumble about how much energy it ate out of the generators._

 _His spinal column is still original. So is his pelvis. Skull is mostly still organic save for his left side, where a massive chunk was replaced with the metallic, and a small portion on his right where his bolt protrudes._

 _Organs are still mostly organic, save for minor modifications through means of a pump._

 _She can't be sure, but there could be an internal generator located behind his ribs, which are metallic._

 _All his other bones had been replaced._

 _[small tear marks evident on paper]_

 _It's different than it was with Crona, but it's so similar. Crona had grow-with-you metallic bones implanted, just like the prototype cyborgs. Stein's taller than his Death Certificate indicated. Medusa must have modified his height._

 _The pain he must have gone through [remainder of page is ripped away]_

* * *

They should have been more specific when they told Crona they were bringing someone over for them to visit. How could the child have known who they meant? If they had dropped a name, a description, anything, no one would have to be in the awkward scenario they were in.

It was almost like it was some sort of spectacle: Spirit and Azusa were already in the room, and as Marie's footsteps clacked down the hallway she heard "And Maka is going to be over later today, okay?" and she had smiled.

And then they walked into the room.

The first thing she noticed was that Crona's head had lifted, their warm, kind eyes looking the same as always until they zoned in on Stein, and when Marie heard him inhale sharply, she knew something was wrong.

Crona's mouth opened, Azusa and Spirit both looked at the doorway where Marie and Stein were, and Crona breathed out "D-doctor?" with the most disbelief Marie had ever heard in her life.

Stein took a step back, his blank face seeming to crack open.

Marie brows met in the middle, her hand twitching to grab Stein's shoulder and steady him. "Doctor?" she called out, and her voice must have been too close to Medusa's. Something must have been wrong wrong wrong, because Stein wrenched away from her and his back hit the wall of the small room, causing a massive thud. Marie's eye widened just as Crona yelped.

"D-doct-" Crona began again, and Stein's voice was sharp and harsh when he almost hissed.

"Don't call me that!" he commanded, his breathing heavy.

Marie didn't know what to do. What had gone wrong? What had happened? What could she do-

"I-I-I-I'm s-s-sor-r-ry-" Crona started, but Stein put his hands up to his ears, shaking his head as he supported himself against the wall.

"Stein!" Marie called out, immediately stepping forward, her hands so desperate to soothe.

"Crona?" Marie heard Azusa ask as Stein slid down to the floor. "Crona, what's going on? Crona?"

There was panic, but Marie's world was narrowing. Stein was shaking so bad she was surprised she didn't hear clanking from his bones knocking together.

"Stein? Stein, I'm here!" Marie said, and everyone's voices were starting to mix together.

"Crona, how do you-"

"Stein, you're oka-"

"I-I'm s-s-orry-"

"It's alright, just-"

"Breathe! You have to breathe-"

"I thought he was d-d-dead-"

"What happened-"

And then Stein's voice broke through all of it. "Shut up!" he yelled, pressing his palms more firmly against his ears.

His shaking was so bad, Marie thought he was going to overheat. Crona was shivering in the corner, having pushed themself there and simply staring at the scene, their head shaking, side to side as though unknowing what to do.

Marie thinks she hears Crona, muffled by the pillow they burrowed their face in, and her heart throbs. It aches. She is burning to help, to do something.

She thinks if either of them could cry, they would.

Marie stepped forward and fell to her knees, bringing her hands over Stein's where he was using them to cover his ears.

His eyes flew open immediately at the action, but instead of flinching or jerking away from her, he calmed, slightly.

Her touch, once upon a time something he would react to almost violently, was helping him. It was positive.

It was more than she could have ever asked for, and she brought her face in close to his.

"I'm here, okay? I'm here," she muttered, and though he couldn't hear her with how hard he was breathing, with how covered his ears were, his eyes focused on her lips and he seemed to relax beneath her gentle coaxing. Even if his world was spinning and he didn't want to be in reality, even if he was spiraling outside of his skin, she wanted him to know that she was there for him.

Everything had spiraled down so quickly. She didn't know what else she could do if not offer her comfort.

Behind her,Marie hears Azusa whisper out "Marie?", likely reaching her hand toward her.

Maybe now she'd believe her. Maybe now Azusa would see that Marie hadn't been lying, that Stein really had found his emotional center again.

What she had compared to PTSD before wasn't a comparison at all, but a fact. Marie couldn't believe she hadn't realized before. She couldn't believe she had been ignorant for months. All the signs pointed to this very outcome.

But Spirit must have grabbed Azusa's arm and directed her back to what was important. Crona was important. Stein was important. And Marie had tuned out the rest of the world, simply talking to Stein and thinking that, if she just listened in hard enough, she'd hear his frantic heartbeat in her ears. But Crona needed someone, too, and Azusa couldn't focus on anything else, at that moment.

It was like the world was shuddering.

Stein held onto Marie like she was his only buoy.

She knows she was clutching him the same way.

* * *

 **Evidence File #127 for Case 3419**

 ** _[Mira Naigus's Audio Account of the Cyborg Codenamed "Crona"'s Original Medical Report]_**

 _Crona was showing signs of severe trauma in abdominal region. Likely starved. Clearly malnourished. Signs of PTSD are evident. Safe-House status granted, room 782 in Safe-House #326. Organic functions all but shut down. Tear-ducts had been removed._

 _Confirmed signs of experimentation. Blood-testing came back positive for organic compounds. Nanotech has ravaged marrow production, resulting in [severe static]_

 _No serial or model numbers evident. Obvious signs of abuse, both physical and mental. Mutterings of a "Doctor" are not elaborated upon._

 _Mutterings of a "Medusa" are, though not without severe emotional reaction. Broken skeletal structure reveals off-market materials being used in maintenance. It has been revealed that Medusa Gorgon is Crona's [sharp thud]._

 _Severe bruising. Multiple fractured ribs. It has been deemed best to put Marie Mjolnir as primary Careworker until the foreseeable future._

* * *

They had been put in separate rooms. Marie felt like, with each step forward, the earth was bottoming out from under her shoes when she walked into Crona's room, knocking a few times only to see Crona flinch, bringing their shoulders up to their ears.

"Crona?" Marie asked, her voice soft. Drained.

Tired.

"M-Ms. Marie. . ."

"Crona? Can I come in?" she asked, waiting until Crona nodded, bringing their pillow in closer to their chest, to open the door further and come in. "I brought some cookies."

Crona only nodded, once more, fidgeting and shivering.

They wouldn't meet her gaze.

Marie put on a thin smile, gently setting the tin of sugar cookies onto the table that Crona was sitting at, having brought it to the corner.

"We can read some poetry, if you'd like?"

A shake in the negative.

"Not even Dickinson? I know you love her poems-"

"I-it was my fault," Crona cut in, blinking rapidly. And Marie noticed a moment too late that the child's eyes were wet.

"Crona? What?"

"I-it's my fault d-doctor S-S-S-Ste-Stein-"

"Crona, it isn't your fault!" Marie reassured quickly, reaching out as though to grab Crona's hands, but they flinched away from her, looking up.

"B-but it is! I-I-I l-list-listened to her! I-I-" Crona had started sobbing so hard, Marie thought the table would start rattling.

"No, Cro-"

"I-I'm sorry!"

"Crona-"

"Marie," Azusa called from the door, and Marie whirled around immediately, her eye wide and confused. "Marie. . .give them a break."

"Azusa-"

"Just. . .give them a second."

She feels like there is nothing under her. Like these is no foundation.

"Crona. . ."

"I-I'm sorry-" the child sniffles again.

She was, too.

* * *

An accomplice. An unwilling accomplice.

Was there nothing that was sacred? No low that witch of a woman wouldn't stoop to? Was there any part of a living being Medusa wasn't ready to demolish?

Marie wanted to vomit. One foot in front of the other, she felt off-kilter as she walked to the room they had corralled Stein into.

No wonder Crona had been so shocked. No wonder they were so inconsolable.

They thought they had killed him. They thought they were a murderer.

Nothing in her felt strong. She didn't feel like she could support anyone.

If she had anything beautiful, anything valuable left in her, she would cull it out and lay as offering to try to ease Crona's pain. She would give everything she had.

But there was nothing any of them could do.

There was nothing she could even say.

The tears were so sudden, she couldn't help them. She ached so deeply for Stein, for Crona. The same woman had been their agony and she felt helpless to stop their hurt, helpless to prevent Medusa from harming anyone else.

It wasn't about her. It could never, would never be about her and she felt guilty for tearing up on their behalf. Stein wasn't able to cry for himself. Crona had lost their tear-ducts.

She thinks someone should weep. Anyone.

She knows Stein is probably waiting for her, since Azusa didn't want to leave him in the dark, but she didn't want him to see her that way. He had calmed, but had simply stared ahead, blankly, when she had left to talk to Crona.

She didn't know if he was remembering. If he was reminiscing. If he was reliving.

Marie hadn't wanted to leave him, but she couldn't live with herself if she left Crona on their own. All the good that did, she thinks, bitterly. Why she insisted on applying importance to herself, she didn't know.

She hoped Stein assumed that she had just taken a detour to go to the bathroom or something equally as simple. She couldn't go back to see him if she was going to be a watery mess. In the narrow hallway, she felt, for once, thankful of the lack of light, and she contemplated actually going to the bathroom to cover up the sound of her sorrow, but she didn't get far before she sniffled, bringing her hand to the right side of her face to wipe the tear away.

She didn't want anyone to hear her. She didn't want anyone to be saddled with her grief over them. Not Crona. Not Stein.

Stein.

He didn't want anyone's pity, she could tell. He didn't want her to treat him as anything other than strong and capable.

And he was. He was on almost every level, just like Crona was.

As she kept walking, the tears had already started to come down, and when she pressed her palm to her cheek once more, the wetness felt disgusting on her hands.

Far enough away, where she thought no one could hear, she finally bowed her head, her shoulders hunching as her back hit the wall and she covered her eye with her hand, the other scrabbling at the cheap walls as though trying to find some kind of purchase, some foundation, something to cling to when it felt like the world was spinning.

She curled it into a fist, slamming it against the walls and worried that someone would hear, but she found that she just needed to get her fury out on something, on anything. Considering the true source of her anger was nowhere to be found, the scapegoat would just have to do.

She didn't hear the footsteps. She didn't hear the soft thud of them as they approached her, as they followed the sound.

Her face was hidden into the shadows, and she had her eye covered, so when he finally stepped in front of her, she didn't realize for a good few moments until she went to wipe her eye again and found herself face to chest with him.

She jolted, nearly jumping up in surprise and nervously cleaning her face off with the sleeve of her hoodie.

"Stein, I-" she couldn't find it in her to finish, the water wail that was her voice the only sound in the general area.

She couldn't face him. She didn't want to. To see disgust or fury or annoyance on his face would be too much for her in that moment and she'd simply crumble to nothing.

Yet, when his hand came to the top of her head, she felt delicate in a different way, fragile.

It was stupid of her. It was stupid in general. And it wasn't fair that there she was, shedding tears he should have had for himself, making it about her once again.

Selfish, she remembers with a bitterness and hopelessness that yawns and stretches inside of her. He was right from the beginning, then.

"I'm sorry," she mumbles out, turning her face away from him even more.

He said nothing. There was no "Don't cry", least of all no "Don't cry for me", but his hand roved over her hair as though curious to how it felt, and she supposed he must have been. It was that curiosity that drove him to do everything. To stay in her apartment, to fight for his emotions, to kiss her.

To kiss her.

They weren't anything. She wasn't his girlfriend, he wasn't in love with her, she wondered if he would even consider them friends: she had no right to sob for him.

Didn't she?

She felt his hand come to the back of her head instead of the top, his fingers looping through her hair, and suddenly, she was facing forward, guided by a gentleness no one could have expected out of a man with a machine for a skeleton.

He brought her face to his chest, just like in the films they had seen together. Just like in those cheap romance movies she'd sighed and pined for, and the sorrow coiled into a ball so heavy in her stomach, vibrating and humming in pain and fury and frustration and overwhelming protection for this man who had everything torn from him, she finally sobbed, loud and embarrassing.

"It isn't fair," she choked out, burrowing her face in his chest and fisting his shirt, leaning onto him entirely. "You and. . .and Crona. . .and it's. . ." she found that she could barely breathe, her lungs refusing to cooperate with her, her heart aching in each way.

Slowly, she felt him bow his head until his cheek was at her crown, and his shoulders hunched in.

Protection, she realized. He was protecting her.

And the selflessness in the action made her hiccup, made her bring an arm around him though she knew touch wasn't what he found pleasure in most, made her hold him as she wept for him and for Crona and for every person that would ever, had ever been in their situation.

"It isn't fair," she said, again, taking in the smell of his shirt and the feeling of his hard body against her. She memorized how his fingers stroked over her ear, how his free arm dangled limply at his side.

That pose she'd never seen before, not in books or films, not in videos or paintings.

It was organic. It was all him.

"I'm so sorry," she finally muttered out, closing her eye and shaking in his hold.

And he pulled her closer.

* * *

 **Evidence File # for Case 3419**

 ** _[continued from previous entry, page ripped at the top and torn around edges]_**

 _was horrible. The very thought of someone having replaced his skeleton makes me want to vomit. Stein. . .he doesn't seem to know what to do._

 _Who can blame him?_

 _We printed out his Death Certificate. I think he wanted to rip it to pieces. I hope he doesn't. But he looked at it almost like he hated it. Like he hated what was on the page._

 _I think he folded it up. I hope he keeps it._

 _Crona. . .Stein._

 _When I was young, I wanted to be a nurse for them, so that I could heal any of their hurt. I didn't know back then that hurt was more than physical._

 _Crona was inconsolable. Spirit said he'd take Maka over later so that she could help. They have a circle of support. That's the best thing to have._

 _Stein was quiet when we went back home. He thinks so much. Keeps so closely to himself._

 _I want him to know he never has to be alone, again._

* * *

Coming home, nothing felt better. It felt bitter. It felt hopeless. But home was home, and when Stein walked in, the tense line of his shoulders loosened, slightly, as he made his way to her couch.

She was glad she could give him a safe-haven. She was glad he could feel safe somewhere.

Anywhere.

It was the only way she could get to sleep, though the fact that she felt drained certainly had something to do with it. And she didn't know how long she had managed to doze off for until frantic beeping hit her ears.

When Azusa called her, Marie didn't even realize what time it was. She woke with a start, probably mid-snore, she thought, her entire mind hazy and her body aching. She was so emotionally drained she had practically fallen into bed the second she got to her home, and though she was tempted to offer Stein a place next to her, just for comfort and nothing else, she had swallowed down the invitation when they got home and simply retired to her room.

She thinks it's a good thing, since the last thing she was when her ringtone blared in her ears was attractive.

She rolled over, her hair in her face, some of the strands coming to her mouth, before she groggily checked the ID and accepted the call, setting the device to the side of her face.

"'Zusa?" Marie asked, running a hand over her only good eye, rubbing some sleep out of it. "What's going on? What happened?"

Her voice was so slurred, she worried if Azusa would think she was drunk.

But she sobered instantly when Azusa's voice, sharp and crisp and barely heard over the whir of an engine called back to her. "It's Crona," Azusa said, some of the vowels cut off. "Ran. . .miss-. ..tracker- Sid! Slow that damn engine!"

Marie sat up immediately, the sound clearing up slightly. "What? Azusa? What?"

"It's Crona," the woman repeated. "They're missing. We're tracking where they went off of the chip on the jacket they picked up, but they left the safe-house."

"What?" Marie all but screeched, throwing her covers off. "What do you mean they left the safe-house? Where are they going?"

"We're following the trail right now. We'll be at your place in a few minutes."

"'Zusa-" Marie started, but she was cut off by the dial tone that indicated that the call had been dropped.

For a moment, Marie could only sit in her bed, the darkness pressing in around her, before her body jolted and her bare feet were meeting her carpet, her light flicking on after she hit the switch. Clothes. Clothes. She had to find her clothes. She couldn't run out in her sleep shorts. She flew her closet door open, and the noise must have disturbed her house-guest, because the next thing she knew, she heard footsteps.

". . .Marie?" Stein asked through the door.

At least he had the courtesy not to barge in. She wouldn't really appreciate that as she was throwing on her pants, fishing her sports bra out from her laundry basket and quickly clasping it behind her, one foot still stuck in a pants' leg.

"Marie?" he asked again, more urgency evident in how he said it. Marie's voice was muffled as she threw her shirt over her head, tugging it down her body though it got stuck around her face as she spoke.

"Sorry! One second!" she called, adjusting her shirt, setting her earpiece into her pocket, and putting her hairband in her mouth as she jumped around, sliding her socks on whilst simultaneously trying to pull her hair up in a ponytail. When she finally managed to throw her door open after putting on her eyepatch, she must have looked like a mess.

He quirked an eyebrow at her, but there was something nervous in his body language as Marie raced past him, making her way to where her combat boots were in the living room.

Her ringtone went off again while she was trying to tie her shoes, and Stein followed her into the living room. If she looked behind her, she'd see that his eyebrows had twitched together, but she was too busy trying to ignore the loud, obnoxious cawing coming from her earpiece. No doubt, it was Azusa telling her that she was at the apartment, waiting for her.

There was no time to spare, and as Marie finally finished lacing up her boots, standing and racing her way to her door, Stein grasped her upper arm and she gasped, whirling around.

Face to chest with him, she had to lift her chin to look at his face.

"Stein-"

"What happened?"

"It's Crona," she started, absolutely breathless from how fast she had to get ready. She thinks if there was a record for anyone pulling on clothing and running out the door, she'd have beaten them by a landslide. "They're missing. We're following the trail and—what are you doing?" she asked, watching with wide eyes as he, too, pulled on his shoes, reaching for his jacket. "Stein, what are you doing?"

"Not staying here."

"Stein, you can't come with us! It's dangerous! You don't know where they're going-"

He turned to look at her, throwing the hood up over his head, his bolt entirely invisible from under the material, pulling the collar up over his lips. She glared, but he met her stare dead-on.

"You're not coming," she assured.

* * *

Topping off the list of people who shouldn't have been crammed into the car but where was Maka and Kid, both of whom were immersed in calling out directions from their devices. Evidently, it was Maka who sounded the alarm on Crona being missing. Spirit didn't take too kindly to finding out that his daughter had been visiting the Safe-Houses after hours, sneaking around after dark, let alone at 4 am in the morning, to meet with her friend.

Marie pinched the bridge of her nose, stuck between Stein, who was squirming slightly from his spot next to her, and Naigus, who was immersed in three different maps, trying to find out where Crona could have possibly heading toward. Sid was at the wheel, likely trying not to throw himself out of the car due to Azusa being the worst passenger's seat driver in the history of the world.

Spirit didn't look too happy, sitting between Maka and Kid in the third row of seats, likely wondering how he was going to keep both of them safe. He was still in his police uniform, his shirt rumpled.

The military vehicle couldn't have been in their possession if it wasn't for Kid, and Marie knew that was the reason he was in the car at all. His close connection to Crona would convince him to break any set of rules for the cyborg, even if it involved abusing his privileges as Lord Death's son.

"Changing coordinates! Crona is headed West," Maka called out, her eyes glued to the small screen with a bright pink dot on it, indicating where Crona was headed.

"Where do I turn?" Sid asked.

"42nd Street," Kid called, practically stretched over Spirit's lap to keep his own eyes on the device.

It was five AM in the morning and Marie felt so disoriented that she didn't even know which direction they were going to turn until Sid took a sharp left, forcing her to fall against Stein's arm, her hand coming to his knee as leverage.

Marie had the distinct feeling that Naigus was staring at her as she said sorry, looking up at Stein's face and seeing the barest ghost of amusement flicker on it. It smoothed over barely a second later to reveal his tired expression.

She couldn't blame him. She was tired, too. And moreover, she had no idea where they were going.

"Any idea where Crona's headed?" she asked, twisting around to look at Naigus. When the woman didn't answer immediately, Marie followed her gaze to see that her hand was still on Stein's knee, and Marie moved her palm immediately, not even noticing.

Naigus's stare met Marie's, and the two of them looked at each other for a second too long, forcing Azusa to peer over her shoulder and for Spirit to zero in on the interaction. After a second, Naigus only looked back at her maps.

"They're in the desert," she said, simply.

"This is an off-road vehicle," Kid added, seemingly uninterested in the tension taking place.

"Then why are we still following the roads?" Sid asked, going at least forty miles over the speed limit.

"Take a right," Maka commanded, not having looked up the entire time, chewing her lip so bad, it must have been chapped to kingdom-come.

And with that, Sid swerved.

The wheels hit sand, kicking up granules into the air. Marie reached over Stein to get the window to close.

Sid pressed down on the gas pedal.

* * *

Stein was on edge when they finally made it to the dilapidated building Crona had stopped at.

There was something eerie about it. The arrows drawn all over the exterior seemed like they would confuse most people. The sand seemed to swirl in the very air, and Marie worried that if she breathed in too hard, she'd find that sand weighing her lungs down until breathing was impossible.

Finding the entrance was the hardest part, but it was Kid who had located it, finding a small opening in the bleached brickwork.

It looked like something out of a horror movie, and all of Marie's instincts were screaming at her while she forced her way through the tiny door. How anything larger than a snake could make it through that tiny slit, she'd never know, but somehow, they had strong armed their way through.

Crona had always been small, thin. Resourceful. She had no doubt that they would have no problems getting in.

The rest of them, however, that was the issue.

She heard cracking behind her and found that, unlike she and Azusa, everyone else couldn't just slide in. Sid had kicked away some of the brickwork, but it was Stein who was standing there with rock crumbling from his fingers.

Marie shuddered. Times like then was when she was most aware of the fact that Stein was mechanically enhanced.

It was cooler in the hallway they had broken into than it was outside, and Maka was running, following the coordinates on her device with Kid hot on her heels. Spirit sprinted off after them.

And then, she finds that they are all running, their footsteps echoing as the floor sloped downward, leading them into the belly of the building. If anything, Maka's long legs extended in front of her, stretching her way ahead of everyone else.

When they took a turn and the dirt of the building changed into chrome, that was when she heard the gasp. Crona's voice was echoing down the hall, shaking, scared.

But so powerful. So determined.

"Y-you s-s-s-said he was-"

"What? Speak up, will you?"

"D-d-d-"

"Deactivated? Oh, Crona, darling. You always were such a dramatist. And you're here for, what? Revenge?" The laugh that bounced arund was cruel, mocking. "How sweet."

"I'm here to. . .to- I'm here to. . ."

And then Stein was running so fast, Marie couldn't even reach out to him. His jacket slipped from her fingers and she didn't even know when she had been holding onto it.

The crack of his boots against the floor was so sharp, Marie had to inhale sharply, and he nearly knocked Maka over as he ran forward, his massive, hulking body taking up almost the entire narrow hallway. There were arrows on the floors and the walls, but he didn't seem to pay them any attention.

Maka gasped, nearly falling into Kid and only kept upright by Spirit grasping her upper arm.

It was almost like Stein knew where he was going.

Like he had been there before.

The inhale Marie took was ragged, her body screaming at her to slow down. A stitch was developing on her side, but she ducked her head down and pounded after Stein, slipping past Maka and trying to keep up.

There was no keeping up with him.

When his footsteps stopped, she thinks her heart did, too.

* * *

"I-I'm here t-to m-m-make sure y-you never h-h-have the c-ch-chance to d-d-d-do that again!" Crona lifted the shaking tire iron up in a sloppy grip, their knees almost buckling together.

"Now, is that really any way to speak to your owner, Crona?" Medusa crooned, a hand on her hip and a smirk on her face. "It's downright rude, don't you think so?"

"L-Lady Medusa. . .I-"

"I know you had to return here because you're pitiful, but really. Would you stop your pointless stuttering? I thought that was removed with your last upgrade." The woman scoffed, sashaying her way over to where a massive computer was, before she leaned against it. "Waste of money, frankly."

"M-Medusa-"

"Yes?" she said, drawing each "s" out so that the word ended in a hiss.

"Y-you. . .y-y-yo-"

"Oh, do speak up. You're a disgrace when you can't even finish a sentence. So many years of technological advancement and you're still just a sputtering pile of spare parts. But don't worry, I'll go ahead and take you apart for scrap in just a second. After all, you did your job." She tsked, shaking her head. "I never thought you'd be good for anything, but it seems you make fine bait, Crona. Wouldn't you say so, Stein?"

The very air went cold when Medusa turned her back to Crona, the child's grasp loosening on the tire-iron in surprise. Stein's stare was icy.

"I'm so glad to have my sweet cyborg back. I seemed to have. . .misplaced you, earlier," she commented, her lips tipping up, and when she looked over at the side, her smirk curled.

Marie had almost barrelled into the cavern immediately, only held back by Azusa and Naigus' quick thinking. Spirit had leaped back right at the mouth of the opening, putting his hand against Maka's lips tokeep her quiet, doing his best to hold on his daughter firm, despite the fact that Maka was desperately trying to race forward.

She knew an enemy when she saw one. Kid, on his part, could only watch with his eyes wide, his hand coming to the wa;; to support himself.

Azusa and Naigus both had a hold on Marie's shoulders, the two of them staring at her as though to tell her not to do anything foolish, even before Sid had gasped.

"She's recording-" he whispered, and that was all it took before Kid looked down to the tracking tablet Maka had passed off to him while he ran, and when he looked at the screen, instead of the tracking diagram, where Crona's pink dot should have been, it was the scene they were looking upon.

Medusa was recording them.

The air felt thick.

She was broadcasting it every newsfeed. Kid flipped through the stations on the tablet frantically, finding the same video on each of them, being filtered in, live. When he stepped forward, his hand outstretched to warn Crona, Sid caught the boy around his waist, covering his mouth.

"Misplaced," Stein droned, stalking forward, nothing but his bare hands at his side.

"Yes. And it was such a shame, don't you think so? We had such fun before." When she smiled wider, it was like something flashed in her eyes.

She looked like a snake.

She looked like she was winning.

Stein said nothing, simply stepping ahead, his eyes never leaving Medusa's face. Behind them, Crona was shaking.

"After all, I really do love you, you kno-"

It happened faster than anyone could have even imagined it. Marie's voice screamed out, a banshee's wail, calling "No!" so loudly, she thinks it shook the building. She mixed in with Crona's sharp gasp, with Maka's struggled shouts.

Suddenly, the sound all exploded as though in warning, but it was too late.

Medusa was recording. Medusa was recording and she had just captured a cyborg murdering a human being.

Marie practically hear it in real time, what people were thinking.

Dangerous. Villains. Monsters. Evil. Cruel. A threat to humanity. A terrorist group.

Marie thinks she was hyperventilating.

Stein's hand had been thrown in through Medusa's diaphragm, the elastic skin giving way almost immediately due to his enhanced skeleton, and the woman sucked in a harsh breath as he worked his way between her ribs, bringing his arm in to the elbow until he went beneath her sternum.

Her lungs shuddered as he grasped hold of something tough and beating, hard, his fingers clamping and feeling the muscle throb in his palm. Medusa's hand didn't even come to his upper arm in an attempt to pull him away. Instead, she looked to the side, where the screen was, and through Kid's device, the saw her look directly at them, her eyes wide and innocent, her expression horrified.

And Stein looked cruel. He looked horrific as the pop and tear of the ventricles seemed to squelch in a sickening symphony, and her ribs cracked, the noise sounding like the crunch of a bone beneath teeth. How Medusa's body was still alive enough to manage the movement of looking at the screen, no one could know, but Marie's howl was still bouncing off the walls as Stein gave a tug and ripped Medusa's heart out from her body, holding it in his hand.

Marie almost vomited. It was still beating, though quickly stopping. Blood was spurting around her and onto Stein, onto the floor and the camera, all around as though a gush of confetti, cherry blossoms at a parade.

Stein looked at Medusa, watching the life leave her eyes, and as she mouthed, one more time, something that looked like "I love you, you know," he tightened his hold on her heart, feeling it, as slippery as it was, crush in his hands.

The muscle of it gave him resistance, but he felt it stop beating against his palm, watched her die.

"What do you know," Stein started, his eyes cold, cruel, unapologetic even as Crona wailed out and Marie's yell faded, "you do have one."

And Medusa fell to the ground, her body giving off a sad thump.

She was still smiling.

When Stein let go of his hold on her heart, it fell next to her, barely making a single noise.

"I would have never guessed."

* * *

She didn't think her lungs understood breath, anymore. Everything in her shuddered, growing cold and crushed. Slowly, she set her gaze on Crona, standing in front of Stein, in front of the corpse of Crona's once-mother, the tire-iron clanking out of their hands.

Stein must have felt her stare on him, because he turned to look at her, and for one heart-wrenching moment, there was nothing on his face but a few flecks of blood, looking more like a gory constellation than anything else. She is stepping to him before she even knows what she's doing, and the world has stopped turning. She doesn't think she hears anything at all. Not Maka's muffled screaming from behind Spirit's hand, not Kid struggling to go to Crona, not Azusa biting off Marie's name while it is halfway out of her mouth.

Marie knows she is stepping into the camera's eye. She knows.

And she doesn't care. Not at that point. Not when he looks so lost, so hurt.

She promised herself that he would never be alone. How could she leave him to deal with the aftermath of Medusa's corpse at his feet? And, at the thought, as she finally makes her way in front of him, she jolts, her feet glued to the floor where Medusa's hemoglobin was slowly pouring. Maybe it would coagulate beneath her feet, maybe she'd be stuck there forever.

And then his face changed, the pinpricks of pain registering so faintly, she wonders if anyone else would be able to make out the signs. There was something tense in his shoulders, the same way it was at his mouth, the way his lips pinched at the edges. His eyes crinkled slightly, and what she thought was blankness in his green-orbs were, instead, a blown-wide pupil, adrenaline running through his entire body.

"Stein. . ." she whispered, trying to command her body to move, and finding that she couldn't.

She heard the struggles of the kids behind her, but she was glad Spirit and Sid had the good sense to hold them back. No doubt, Baba Yaga had gotten the feed. They were probably tracking the location.

The world was bottoming out from beneath her feet, legs buckling from the pressure of the situation. Her life, regardless of how meager or flimsy, regardless of how hard, was being pulled from her. In one motion, Medusa had been their entire downfall.

Or, perhaps not.

Marie took a deep breath, feeling as though she were going to explode, turning into a massive supernova of light that would take everything with her. But she didn't. There was no starlight to stain the walls, no planetary collision.

There was only a slowly cooling corpse, a shaking child that fell to their knees just as Stein stood, staring at her, and when she finally moved, her body gravitating to him, he curled his shoulders in as though trying to compress down to nothing.

"Oh, Stein," Marie repeated.

He looked shattered, but not worn down. Something had broken in him, but whether it was free or open or down, she didn't know.

What she did know was he was keeping a sky on his face, a flicker of bloody stars across his cheekbones, and though she wanted to cup his cheek, instead, she slowly reached up, having to stretch her body to reach his face, and gently swiped away the dots that adorned his face. "Oh, Stein."

"I don't know who that is," he told her, lips barely moving. The vulnerability on his face was so new, and she realized a moment too late that he was shaking. "I don't know who I am. Would who I was do that?"

She thinks her heart, previously sunk to her belly, lifted to her throat as though it were punched, and her fingers stuttered over his flesh, his gaze nearly hopeless.

"Who you are," she told him, the words bubbling out of her, "saved Crona. Who you are killed the woman who hurt both of you."

"Marie. . ."

When she looked at him, she knew she would hide him away from anything, shoulder his body through any tempest, and her thumb gently stroked over his cheekbone without meaning to.

"You are who you are."

His stare was unnerving, but it had changed. Something in his eyes flickered to life. He seemed to flicker to life, and she could have been imagining it, but he seemed to lean into her touches.

His unblinking gaze didn't let up, but his olive eyes seemed to warm, and she tilted her chin to look him head-on. Though there was nothing to be joyful about, the tenderest scrap of a smile comes across her lips, and she cupped his cheek in her palm.

He was shaking beneath her touch, and she didn't know to put her arm around him for support until he was sinking to the ground, his pants getting blood-soaked, his head bowing down, breath shuddering. She threw her arm around him and followed him down, knowing that the knees of her pants were going to be darkened.

The gore collected into the fabric, the smell already making her sick, but she tugged Stein to her, and his chin hooked over her shoulder, his hands shaking.

"Marie," he whispered, and it sounded so delicate she couldn't help but pull him closer to her body, wanting to hide him from an entire world that was watching them.

"I'm here," she said, reassuring as her fingers smoothed down his spine. "I'm here. I'll always be here."

He burrowed his face against her shoulder, and she finally felt both of his palms on her back before he pressed her against him, shuddering in her grasp.

When she lifted her chin, turning her head to look into the cameras, she thinks that she wanted everyone to memorize her face. She wants them to know who she is, that she does not stand for what her society has done.

That she is Marie Mjolnir. That she will go to her grave fighting for what was right.

She looks into the eye of the camera and she hopes everyone is watching when she turns away, setting a kiss to where Stein's bolt meets his skull.

"I'll always be here."

And the world watches.

And she holds Stein close.

* * *

Azusa couldn't leave Marie to the wolves. And neither could Naigus. And neither could Sid.

Besides, what did they have to lose? It was die trying and they always knew how to kick and fight their way out of any messy situation. Sid had thrown Kid to Spirit's grasp, the two of them almost overwhelming the redhead as he stayed in the shadows, keeping all their faces hidden from the cameras.

"Cut the feed!" Azusa screamed, her fingers flying over the massive supercomputer that had been set up. Naigus's and Sid's and Spirit's police phones were going off like crazy. The entire force was going to be on them in record time. They were tracking the feedback.

"I'm trying!" Naigus called back, her bare hands grasping exposed wires and pulling, sparks flying when they disconnected. The lights flickered, backup generators likely turning on. Sid cursed before he pulled back, staring at where Crona was, seeing the tire iron on the floor.

When he gunned forward, Crona made no reaction, simply staring at the corpse of their once-mother. Sid grabbed it up, and didn't even hesitate before he slammed it into one of the screens, watching glass fly from the smack. Azusa ducked to the side and Naigus covered her head with her arms. Maka was still shrieking, trying to get Crona to look up, to look at them. Kid was yelling, fighting in Spirit's grasp as Sid continued to destroy the entire workspace.

"Sid!" Naigus yelled, turning away as more glass went flying, as well as chunks of metal that were chucked around the room like shrapnel.

"We don't have any time!" he replied, rearing back and slamming the tire-iron against more of Medusa's lab.

"What if it combusts, Sid?" Azusa screeched.

He didn't listen to her, and after Naigus took a glance around the room, she locked eyes with Azusa before she picked up one of broken pieces of metal on the ground, running forward and slamming it against one of the cameras.

"Then I'd rather go down in flames," Naigus said, snarling as she repeated the motion with another of the cameras.

Azusa's mouth opened for a moment before she closed it, her teeth clicking.

When she picked up a chair, calling out "Duck!", Sid almost fell to the floor before Azusa threw the entire thing into the massive screen.

"It's cut!" Spirit screamed, barely sounding like himself.

"And the audio?" Naigus asked, her eyes wide as she whirled around. The tablet that had the broadcast on it, that had once been in Kid's hands, showed nothing but static.

"It's all cut!" Spirit said, finally releasing Maka and Kid, the two of them gunning forward to Crona.

"Crona!" Maka shrieked, skidding so badly she almost passed her friend. "Crona! Crona talk to me?" Maka asked, pressing her hands against Crona's arms as the cyborg stared at the corpse in front of them. Kid was slower, sinking down to the ground and gently reaching forward, whispering the bot's name.

Azusa was breathing hard, all the adrenaline in her body coursing through her. Spirit was supporting himself against the wall.

"It saw all of us?" Azusa panted out, staring straight ahead.

Spirit was silent, swallowing hard, before his voice croaked out. "Yeah. . .everyone but Maka, Kid, and I."

Naigus turned, looking at where the two children were, next to Crona, supporting the bot, whose shoulders were shaking so hard, there was no doubt that, if they had the ability to cry, they would be. Then, her eyes flicked to where Marie and Stein were, still holding each other with Marie's cheek pressed against Stein's scalp. The man in her hold was slumped against her, as though using her as support.

"What do we do now?" Azusa asked, her back to the long-dead corpse on the ground that had made everything crumble, her voice small.

"We have to run," Naigus said, suddenly feeling like she were going to collapse.

"Where? Where is there to go?" Sid asked, taking in a deep breath.

"Anywhere," Naigus countered. "If we stay here, we're dead."

Over their police phones, they heard the furious call for all personnel to come to the coordinates, that a murder had taken place at-

"I. . .Guys, I-" Spirit started, cutting off the sound of the feed, his beautiful green eyes, such a close match to his daughter's, blinking back what looked like a sheen of wetness.

There was a hesitation before Sid dropped the tire-iron, walking over to his friend. Sid's palm clapped over the other man's shoulder, a solidarity that seemed to ground the redhead, and he looked around at the accepting gazes of his friends, his heart feeling as though it was going to burst, emotions welling up harshly. "I can't do this alone," Spirit whispered.

They all heard a rustle before Marie's voice called out, and everyone turned to look at her.

"You won't be alone," Marie said, finally standing up with Stein, her caramel eye accepting and kind. "You have Justin. And. . .well, we've survived this long. You can't get rid of us this easily."

"But-" Spirit began, biting his inner cheek, hard.

"We'll find a way."

"When was the last time we couldn't come up with some kind of solution?" Naigus asked, a wistful, almost amused look on her face, though it was tinged with such obvious sadness.

"We have an accuracy rate of 98%. Our track record is immaculate," Azusa added.

"But. . .where will you go?" he asked, biting at his lip.

"Anywhere," Marie told him. "Anywhere safe."

"And if there is nowhere?"

"Then we'll just have to make a somewhere," she replied back.

"And we will," Naigus reassured.

"But-"

"Spirit, you don't have any time left. . .you need to get out of here so you can join the police ranks on their way here," Sid cut in, and when Spirit looked at the man, they locked gazes."You need to get Maka and Kid out of here, Spirit."

At the mention of his daughter, Spirit nodded a few times, swallowing hard.

"Please be safe," Spirit requested. "Please. . ."

"We will be," Sid said, smiling softly, a determined expression on his face. "Now, get those kids out of here and give Maka a chance."

Spirit's lip was wobbling as he made his way forward, walking woodenly over to where Maka was, where she began to shriek and scream, refusing to get away from Crona. Naigus closed her eyes, all but falling against the ruined mess that was Medusa's workplace, trying to block out the sound of Maka screaming "I won't leave her like you left Mama!"

Then, there was quiet.

"You need to go, Maka," Crona said, their voice small, but steely.

Naigus whipped her head up, her eyes widening, the same as everyone else's, focusing on the scene.

"Crona-" Maka started, her face set. "I'm not-"

"Y-you need to go. . .t-th-think about Soul. . .Black*Star. . ."

"But Crona-"

"L-Liz. . .and Patti."

"But what about you? Crona?" Kid butted in, his heart thudding painfully in his chest as he searched Crona's face. Maka had started to cry, the tears coming over her cheeks and dripping down her chin.

"I. . ." Crona looked around, looking over Maka and Kid's heads, meeting the gaze of everyone else. "I have my. . .family," they said, finally looking over at Marie. "I. . .I have to. . .I h-have to help them."

Marie smiled, though she had to wipe her own tears away. She looked like a pillar of strength, like a beacon of light in nothing but darkness.

"Maka. . .Kid. . ."

"Maka," Spirit said. "We have to go."

Maka let loose a sob, clutching onto Crona's shirt, only heaving forward to hug her friend when Kid lowered his face to Crona's shoulder, shuddering against them.

"Y-you have the tracker," Crona said, though it was uncertain as to which of the two children they were speaking to.

Maka nodded against Crona's shirt before she pulled away. "I'll find you. I'll find you, again, Crona. And then. . ."

"Yeah," Crona said, nodding.

"I'll come back for you," Maka promised. "I'll always come back for you."

For the first time in too long, Crona smiled, and from over Maka's head, Crona could see that Kid was nodding. "I will do everything I can to see you again, Crona," Kid said, his voice sad, but determined.

"I know you will," Crona told them. Behind them, Spirit wiped his face and turned to his friends.

Naigus was the one who met his eyes, and when she mouthed "Ditto," Spirit only nodded, extending a soft, sorrowful smile.

"Maka, Kid. . .let's go," he said, finally hauling the two of them up and hiding his face as they raced out of the vicinity.

"Remember! Remember, Crona! We'll be back for you!" echoed through the room.

And then, they too were gone.

Azusa stood up, though her knees felt like they'd knock into each other and break beneath the pressure. "We need to go," she said. "We need to go, now."

"There's nothing but desert for miles, so if we wanna make it out of here with our lives, we need to gun it," Naigus added, looking around the lab and trying to find anything useful to grasp up.

Marie looked at her friends, watching as they surveyed the vicinity to see if there was anything of value they could sell to start up a life, any hint to a vehicle or a safe-house, any sign of a hidden room they could hole up in.

Marie knew they'd make it. They always had. Slowly, she looked up at Stein before she looked over at Crona, and the man nodded, a sign for her to make her way forward.

When she came over Crona, the child looked up at her with eyes that looked like bottomless pits. Marie offered a smile, a hand.

"No one blames you. . .for anything," she said, and it took Crona a second. They looked around her, glancing at Stein who locked eyes with them as though analyzing before he nodded.

Crona took in what felt like the first breath of the night, their fingers reaching fr Marie's.

Crona's hand was so much larger than her own, and the child was shaking like a leaf, but at Marie's touch, they seemed to calm.

"She was my mother," Crona said, and Marie realized that at no point had their fingers touched Medusa's long-paled cheek. Instead, they had settled on their haunches, simply staring at the corpse the entire time.

"It takes more than birthing a child to make a mother, Crona," Marie informed, and Crona only shook their head.

"I didn't want. . .I didn't want this to happen."

Marie's palm settled on their back, softly. "We know. . .Crona, we know."

At that, Crona looked down, back to the corpse, their pink hair swishing across their cheek. "A-and now-"

"And now we run. Now we can start all over," Marie reassured, and around them, Naigus and Azusa and Sid had stripped the room of everything useful, calling out that it was time to go, that there was a car, that there was a chance.

"Crona, do you want to start over?" Marie asked, ducking her head and gently moving Crona's hair out of their eyes.

"I. . ." Crona looked up, over to where Stein was, watching as he walked to them. "I. . .y-yes. . .I w-want. . .I w-want to," Crona said, and Marie hold on their hand tightened, pulling the child close to her side before they had to follow Azusa's lead as she looked over the blueprint of the catacomb-like cavern that was Medusa's lab.

Marie left hand was curled around Crona's, leading the child out, and to her side, Stein was a warm, comforting presence. It was nothing like the first time she met him, when he couldn't hold himself up, when she raced them out of their potential graveyard and nearly made that possibility a reality.

She almost jolted when her thoughts were disturbed by a cold, calloused touch on what of her arm was exposed, and she looked down at her right hand, finding Stein's finger trailing down her wrist.

The blood on his hands had dried, flecking off like paint chips and falling to the floor, revealing clean, pale skin beneath it. After a moment, when she looked over at him, meeting his eyes and then down, to where his hand was waiting for her, she sniffled, the weight of their future pressing against her.

But on three sets of shoulders, on more than that, she thinks she could support the entire world.

She opened her hand to him, spreading her fingers as though inviting him to slide his own between them, filling her spaces.

The touch was hesitant yet familiar. They knew each other, knew the feeling of palm against palm, nothing but a sliver of space left. And through it, she knew everything he could want to say to her.

That he was there. That he wouldn't be there if he didn't care. That he cared. That he was there for her.

As they raced out of the tunnels, one foot coming in front of the other, her hand rubbed against his, forcing more of the dried blood off. They were all haggard, making their way to the car where Sid would have to hotwire. The sirens were starting to come into their hearing, an impending doom she knows they'd avoid by barely the skin of their teeth.

She heard the sound of the engine Sid managed to start.

When they finally caught up to where Azusa and Naigus were already settled in their seats, the light nearly blinded them, forcing their hold to tighten, their fingers still intertwined.

Crona let go first, jumping into the vehicle, and then, Stein made his way in, still holding her hand.

When Marie looked at where they were joined, where he was grasping her with a lover's touch, she couldn't help but smile.

His hands were clean as they pulled her into the car where there was barely enough space for all of them. Crona was curled at the far left side, Stein to the right, and Marie found her place between them just as the car reared forward.

As Sid slammed on the gas pedal, kicking sand up all around them, swerving sharply to the side, Marie fell into Stein, her hand coming to his chest where she felt his heart beating. His hand came to her own, covering it.

And neither of them pulled away.

* * *

 **Oh, man, it's finally done! This massive behemoth of a fic has been the absolute bane of my existence, as well my baby, for months now! Huge huge HUGE thanks go out to Jcrycolr3wradcse, who has supported me more than I can ever say, and Crimson-Lia, who is too sweet for words. Both of you have been incredible betas, and this fic wouldn't even EXIST without you guys.**

 **The INCREDIBLE LostLegendaeri at lostlegendaerie .tumblr ( dot com) is responsible for the amazing cover art! The link to it can be found here (** **lostlegendaerie .tumblr (dot com) /post /135045029678/ it-was-the-whisper-that-made-her-stop-the-slight)** **and lemme give a HUGE s/o to her for putting up with me. She is gloriously talented! Check out her art if you value creative ideas, clean execution, and IMMACULATE colors!**

 **I actually ended up handwriting the diary entries, and if you would like to see them, please go ahead and visit this fic on Archive of Our Own, found here (archiveofourown (dot org) /works/ 5405687/ chapters/ 12488639)**

 **Thank you to the excellent mods of Resbang for giving me this opportunity, and thank YOU for reading!**


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